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Sure. By "trident" I really mean any merchant silicon switching platform. The Broadcom Trident ASIC/chipset really kicked this market segment off in 2011/2012ish. I mentioned it specifically as products like the Juniper QFX3500 series really opened up the door for things like fat/high radix clos networks that we're seeing in production.

From memory the Trident boxes supported 640gbs of throughput on SFP+ or QSFP ports, about 10,000 prefixes/routes, a couple thousand ACL terms, 1 or 2u, and around 200watts. They cost maybe $20,000 at launch are down to $5-10,000 now depending on volume and vendor. That's great for a TOR or agg switch if you can manage the individual devices (as opposed to a switch chassis like a nexus 7K).

The other thing those really opened up is cheap as chips edge devices. 10,000 routes isnt a lot, but it works if you have limited peers or can do summarization off device like a route reflector. These chipsets, and trident in particular, also work great with things like OpenFlow as you move that expensive route computation off device to a specialized platform.

The trident platform is basically EOL'd, everyones moved on to Trident II for the most part. Trident II is like 100,000 prefixes, 50,000 ACLs, 1 or 2u, 200 to 400 watts, 1.2TBs of forwarding, and SFP+/QSFP ports. Price is $15-25,000 depending on volume and vendor etc. Pushing 640gbs of throughput for ~$20,000 is pretty crazy. It means I could build a single 10kVa server rack that pushes a legit 1tbs of traffic to the internets for about $200,000. Totally insane to think about compared to just a few years ago.

The next big change should be moving from 10/40 serdes to 25/100 in the next year or so. The Broadcom Tomahawk should be like 3tbs in 2u and a couple hundred watts for comparable prices. If you need to convert between 10/40 and 25/100 ("gearbox") cost and complexity will go up a bit.

http://etherealmind.com/merchant-silicon-vendor-software-ris... http://whiteboxswitch.com/collections/10-gigabit-ethernet-sw...

edit: and to clarify these platforms usually use Intel CPUs to run the OS/route engines. The OS/RE/HAL, like cumulus provides, is then responsible for pushing updates down to the switching asic.