ASICs Behind the Scenes

A lot of people love to talk about ASICs and merchant silicon, but very few really understand the basics. Now there’s a quick way to fix that: watch the excellent Tech Field Day video with Dave Zacks from Cisco Systems.

If you know nothing about ASICs, the first part of the video is pure gold – it describes the basics of the underlying technologies and development processes as well as differences between generic CPUs, FPGAs and ASICs.

The second part of the video is the reason Cisco decided to do this presentation: Dave started praising the beauties of Cisco’s ASICs, including the recirculation and programmable pipeline… but even though there’s plenty of marketing there, the video is still well worth your time.

BTW, the programmable ASIC pipeline isn’t exactly a Cisco-only feature. It’s also available in Intel’s FM6000 and probably in new HP ASICs we discussed on Software Gone Wild.

Finally: we all know that someone paid for that video to be shot, but whenever you get something valuable, it’s time to say thank you regardless of how and why it was produced (particularly if it’s free) – so THANK YOU Dave and Cisco Enterprise Switching!

18 comments:

  1. It was a great presentation! Thank you for sharing Ivan.
  2. I enjoyed the video, but am still a bit confused what the difference is between a FPGA and the new Cisco ASIC (apart from the fact it costs Cisco less to produce). I was under the impression the use cases opened up by new ASIC have always been possible with hardware running on FPGAs.
    Is the new ASIC just a Cisco custom FPGA, or are the technologies fundamentally different?
    Replies
    1. FPGA = Field Programmable ... - you can change its hardware configuration as needed. You can't do that with regular chips (including ASICs).
    2. But isn't that what he claims? It's an ASIC that is now programmable at various points in the pipeline. How is that different than an FPGA?
    3. No, (as far as I understand) an FPGA is silicon where you can "re-arrange" the physical connections within the chip upto a certain point thru the software - think of an electronic crossbar, f.e..
      An ASIC includes a fixed hardware configuration with a almost fixed software instruction set - you cannot change this without re-engineering and replacing the chip once it's been constructed. That's why a Cat3550 will never do IPv6 or GRE in hardware, f.e..
      A programmable ASIC is somewhere in between. It has a fixed hardware configuration but was designed and built with certain features & goals in mind that might be relevant in the future. The instruction set is not fixed and can be updated by software (a.k.a. "microcode").

      As Ivan already mentioned, this concept is not entirely new, afaik it's been there with the EARL ASICs of the Cat6K platform for quite a while as well as with the Cat3560-X / Cat3750-X platform.
      But the difference is, that UADP brings it to a entirely different scale in what you / Cisco can do with it.

      Regards
      Christoph
    4. OK, I guess I was confused because I have seen FPGA described as a programmable ASIC (pASIC) going back a quite a few years so I wasn't sure how this was actually different.
    5. Actually : "A programmable ASIC is somewhere in between."

      All asics are programmable, you can either use Verilog or VHDL , but the thing is fpgas, cpu's and asics are programmable.

      Tosach is right but he must also know that most of the differences in FPGA and ASIC are in terms of adaptability (heat distribution, space distribution, power consumption) because they're meant for prototyping.
      "It has a fixed hardware configuration but was designed and built with certain features & goals in mind that might be relevant in the future. "

      This refers to the UASIC , Unified (probably serves as a trademark here but i'll use it for simplicity's sake)because it's made for long term use, and technology adaptation regardless of further implementations.
    6. FPGA: Load a new Verilog/VHDL Image
      ASIC: Fixed H/w functionality
      Programmable ASIC: A pipeline that changes based on Software instructions written in C or Assembly or special microcode.
  3. Interesting Presentation. Seem to open up lot of questions for me.

    1) With program-ability is concerned, Is UADP similar to Barefoot chip ?. BTW, What is use of program-ability and how different it is from TCAMs ?.

    2) This talk seems to open the debate of doing overlay's with general purpose CPUs. Given that chips like UADP optimizes re-circulation, is not doing overlay with general purpose CPU costly?

    3) Is not similar question arise for NFV deployment, that is. Is not costly to switch using general purpose cpu when compared to ASIC ?
  4. Hi! The one thing that confused me a bit, what type of silicon is used in Cisco ASR (Cisco Flow Processor) or Juniper MX (Trio Chipset). Both of them claimed to be programmable, but Juniper calls it like "Network Processor". Is it based on FPGA technology or it is general purpose CPU with special hardware offload on ASIC or FPGA basis? Both these platforms are very flexible and new features are introduced on regular basis, but in the same time speed of line cards pretty excitement, nevertheless cost is very high.
    Replies
    1. Well, it depends on what ASR you're looking at. In case of the ASR 1000, it's the QFP ("QuantumFlow Processor") which is a so called NPU. An NPU is more or less an array of multiple (= dozens, hundreds) processors (cores) optimized for "pushing packets" and therefore, in most of the cases RISC-based. You'll find that typically in routers where you need throughput with a lot of features. So technically, these boxes are software routers but without the "legacy drawback" due to maximized parallelization.
      FPGAs are almost never used as the main "engine" due to several constraints (see the presentation).

      Other ASRs utilize other chips, often merchant silicon (ASR9K -> Broadcom Trident / Typhoon / Tomahawk, ASR90x -> Broadcom) which also might be NPUs.


    2. Christoph, thank you for answer! If I understand correctly, NPU is general CPU based, but with limited instructions to provide better performance, am I right? So it is somewhere in the middle between x86 CPU and FPGA for performance and flexibility. Is it correct?
    3. Yes, pretty much. The limited instruction set has in general not much to do with performance but with cost (RISC vs. CISC architecture) which might not apply under all circumstances. Overall an NPU is for forwarding packets, so there is no need for let's say video encoding stuff in there.

      The performance gain comes due to the parallelization:
      The glory Cisco 7200 (predecessor of the ASR1K) platform had only one CPU with a single core that could serve one thread. So everything had to be scheduled in a way the CPU time was "good enough" distributed between all the stuff going on (e.g. packet forwarding, CLI, routing protocols, QoS, ...). Went pretty decently if you had a decent amount of traffic & features but ugly with lots of features and traffic because no task got "enough" CPU time - pretty big deal if you have real-time traffic (jitter and so on, IEE1588 / PTP over that platform -> bad idea).
      Now a ASR1K has per ESP one or maybe more QFPs with I think 100-something cores each now and whatever number of threads per core. You can also overload that thing for sure - but you need _a lot_ of traffic & features until you run out of CPU / NPU time.

      It's basically the same concept with PC CPUs: A decade ago we had single core CPUs what a single process could block the whole box for a while. Than it went down with Intel introducing HyperThreading - 2 threads on one CPU. After that it moved on with dual-, quad-, octa-, ... core CPUs which might also run HyperThreading. Nowadays, nobody cares if a process takes 100% CPU time at 3 or 4 logical cores if there are still 3 or 4 available.

      I'm not an silicon engineer, so really I don't have any "real insight" into this, but at the end of the day, I think it's not a question of if you can to a certain task with an ASIC, a p-ASIC, a FPGA, a NPU or a general CPU - for sure, you can.
      But it's a matter of what you need, want to do in the future with that chip and what price tag you need:
      Merchant silicon is "cheap" but might no have what you need, custom ASICs take long to develop and thus is costly, FPGAs are flexible but expensive and power-hungry and have probably a bigger form-factor (physical dimensions), NPUs a something between and general CPUs don't provide that scale yet like an NPU (never heard of a 100+ core CPU).

      Regards
      Christoph
    4. Good morning, Christoph!
      Thank you for great answer! Now it is pretty clear for me.
    5. Juniper has something which is called NISP which is quite different than the others.
  5. Christoph/Ivan, is it possible to clarify on the CISCO ASR 9k mounting Broadcom statement ? Cisco claims for instance that the tomahawk chipset it mounts on, say, the asr9922 has nothing to do with the Broadcom's one if not just the same name.
    Replies
    1. Looks like it really is a different chipset (great choice of name though ;) https://clnv.s3.amazonaws.com/2018/usa/pdf/BRKARC-2003.pdf

      Nobody in his right mind would call Broadcom Tomahawk NPU ;))
  6. Thanks Ivan much appreciated !!!! as otherwise it generates lots of confusion.
    Unbelievably bad choice of naming from Cisco marketing I guess as pretty self-inflicting.
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