Arista Shows Scale-Across Network Switches at SC25

At SC25, we saw something neat in the Arista booth. Going through the photos, Arista showed off not just a high-throughput Broadcom Tomahawk switch, but also brought Broadcom Jericho 3 hardware for scale-across networking. Scale across networking is becoming a hot topic as the idea of adding deep buffering to help bridge large AI campuses or even multiple campuses has taken hold.

Arista Shows Scale-Across Network Switches at SC25

At SC25, we saw three switches running in a rack. Immediately, we noticed this Arista 7280R4K-32DE, which was different. This is a 32-port QSFP-DD 800G switch with another eight 25GbE ports. The switch sports encryption on all of the 800G ports and 32GB of packet buffer memory. If that seems like a lot, the reason these scale-across switch chips need so much packet buffer memory is because as the distance and speed scale, there are more packets being transmitted over the wire at…