Arista Warrior

Chapter 3. Merchant Silicon

If you’ve shopped for data center switches with any of the major networking equipment vendors recently, you’ve likely heard the term merchant silicon thrown around. There’s a lot of back and forth between the major players about custom silicon versus merchant silicon, and which one is better. Let’s take a look at the details, and see if one really is better than the other.

The Debate

To start with, let’s define our terms:

Custom silicon

Custom silicon is a term used to described chips, usually ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits), that are custom designed, and usually built, by the company selling the switches in which they are used. Another term I might use would be in house when describing such chips. As an example, Cisco Nexus 7000 switches use Cisco-designed proprietary ASICs.

Merchant silicon

Merchant silicon is a term used to described chips, usually ASICs, that are designed and made by an entity other than the company selling the switches in which they are used. I might be tempted to say such switches use off-the-shelf ASICs, though that might imply that I could buy these chips from a retail store. I’ve looked, and Wal-Mart doesn’t carry them. As an example, Arista’s 7050S-64 switches use Broadcom’s Trident+ ASIC.

So that seems pretty cut and dry, but which one is better? That all depends on what you mean by better. Let’s take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of each. First, the benefits and drawbacks of custom silicon:

Benefits of custom ...