Cisco’s growing family of silicon chips has reached another milestone in the company’s quest to transform the Internet. Last Thursday, Cisco announced it is marrying the chip, known as Cisco Silicon One, with its line of Catalyst switches — a first.

The news was part of a larger announcement introducing a raft of new enterprise networking solutions to help customers address hybrid work. Powering the new Catalyst 9000X series switches with Silicon One boosts performance, efficiency, and security.

Viewed from 30,000 feet, it also marks the next logical step in Cisco’s grand plan to reinvent the Internet for the future. After its December 2019 launch, Silicon One was originally deployed in web scale and service provider networks. Thursday’s announcement expands Silicon One to the enterprise network core.

The expansion is a testament to the flexibility and adaptability of the chipset’s architecture. Importantly, it also delivers on Cisco’s promise of one architecture covering service provider, web scale, and enterprise networks.

Why proprietary chipsets?

There are clear benefits to companies using their own chipsets. One is the opportunity to differentiate from the competition, and to use that differentiation to drive one’s strategy in the market, said Gianluca Calabretta, who leads Cisco’s routed optical networking EMEAR sales specialist team.

In the case of Silicon One, a major differentiator is the adaptability of the new architecture. Traditionally, networks have used different types of silicon for different parts of the network — access, edge, core, and so on. But Silicon One can serve anywhere in the network and in any form factor.

This enables developers and network operators to focus all resources on understanding, qualifying, deploying, and troubleshooting one architecture. This in turn reduces the cost for both investment and operations.

Silicon One delivers best-in-class programmability, performance, buffering, scale, and power efficiency. There’s also a straight line between its power efficiency and increased sustainability — another major differentiator, Calabretta said.

Using proprietary chipsets also provides a buffer against supply chain issues, allowing companies to remain independent of third parties. For Cisco, the vertical integration that comes with using its own chips is key to the company’s silicon strategy.

“It helps us not only to drive the customer from a technological perspective, but it also improves the cost competitiveness of our routing platform,” Calabretta said.

The chip wars continue

Cisco’s entry into the silicon market has created waves. Its key competitors in the service provider space are Nokia and Juniper. Other players include the likes of Broadcom, Huawei, Intel, and Arista Networks.

The chip wars are nothing new.

“What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of an ongoing war,” Calabretta said. “High-end routing platforms and all the major competitors in the space always had proprietary chipsets”.

In addition to Silicon One’s unified silicon architecture, what sets Cisco apart from the rest of the field is the sheer breadth of its strategy. Where some of its competitors may have a solid silicon strategy, Cisco takes a multi-pillar approach.

The strategy Cisco launched in 2019 combines investments not just in silicon, but also in optical networking (centered on Cisco’s Acacia optics), and in network operating system and application software.

“That is something that no one else in the industry today can claim to have — a broad, end-to-end architectural strategy that’s not just focused on a routing platform or silicon,” Calabretta said.

One architecture to rule them all

To date, Cisco has pumped out 11 incarnations of Silicon One. Six of those devices are focused on routing, five on web scale switching. All share one architecture.

The cost competitiveness of a unifying architecture further reinforces the promise of future expansion of Silicon One to new roles in service provider, web scale, and enterprise networks. At the same time, it expands next-generation device performance and value leadership.

So what’s next in Cisco’s quest to reinvent the Internet for the future?

Calabretta says the company aims to replicate the Silicon One strategy that’s been so effective to date in other layers of the network.

In the short term, that means continuing the mixed strategy supporting Cisco’s routed optical networking story.

In the mid to long term, it means continuing to evolve Cisco’s unified silicon story for an entire end-to-end architectural proposition supporting use cases such as 5G.

In 2019, Cisco asserted that Silicon One would form the foundation of its routing portfolio for more than the next decade. Just over two years and 11 chip models later, that prediction is holding true.