[es09]

I doubt if reducing cost can be the only factor. Broadcom chips are going to be pretty much the lowest cost ones because of their scale. It's more likely that they are dreaming up some network architecture that isn't served well by existing solutions.

[discodave]

By lowest cost I didn't mean the actual cost of the chips but the cost of the whole architecture. As you point out, the best solution might require chips that can't be found off the shelf.

I guess the metric they're trying to optimize is cost/performance/watt or something like that.