This is Broadcom Tomahawk 4 64-port 400GbE Switch Chip

When it comes to high-end switches, we’ve tried to offer more gear on STH over the past few years. While we’ve focused on server CPUs for over a decade, modern ASIC switches push I/O far beyond a modern CPU’s. We recently had the opportunity to get a loose Broadcom Tomahawk 4 ASIC key to show our readers. This is a very popular segment, but Broadcom has very little marketing so people probably won’t see it.

Broadcom Tomahawk 4 64-port 400GbE Switch Chip

This giant chip is Broadcom Tomahawk 4. It has massive bandwidth and is very popular in the industry.

Slide width alone does not necessarily mean its size. Here’s a 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” server CPU next to a Broadcom Tomahawk 4.

While you might be tempted to think of the Tomahawk 4 as a low-power chip, here’s a Dynatron J12 for AMD EPYC SP5 Genoa next to the heatsink of the 64-port 400GbE FS switch covering the Broadcom Tomahawk 4 chip.

Of course, the main advantage of the Tomahawk 4 is connectivity. 64 ports of 400G means we have a lot of I/O pins. This is the underside of the Tomahawk 4 pad.

Tomahawk 4 is housed in the LGA8371 socket. This appears to be made by TE Connectivity. That’s a lot of pins!

Since we didn’t have the proper suction cup for this, instead here the Tomahawk 4 manually pulls out of the LGA8371 socket. Do not do this!

Here is the chip in the socket with the bore open. The retention here is closer to an AMD EPYC 7001-7003 Naples/Rome/Milan rather than a Genoa or Xeon since it is the retention chip that provides the force needed to keep the chip. Modern server CPUs use heatsink to perform necessary operations. clamping force.

Here Tomahawk 4 in the socket.

Here’s another charming shot just because people rarely see it.

This is the opposite side.

Perhaps this is something one does not see every day. Most of the switches we’ve reviewed have key ASICs soldered to the main switch PCB. This was different allowing us to show this view.

last words

One may have noticed that we also now have a loose Tomahawk 4 that has found its way into the background of the STH YouTube group. This was so cool that once we saw it, we had to find a way to get one for the group.

Not having the right equipment, but doing chips like the Ampere Altra/Altra Max helped prepare us to do this installation. This is a large socket and we expect server CPUs to start using more sockets in 2023/2024.

If you recently saw our NVIDIA ConnectX-7 400GbE and NDR Infiniband Adapter review from PNY or our FS 400Gbase-SR8 400GbE QSFP-DD Optical Transceiver Review, you’ll see the key we found this one in. We’ll review the 400GbE FS switch once we’ve finished editing the video.

While 400GbE is interesting, Broadcom already has the 800GbE of the 5th generation Tomahawk we saw at OCP Summit 2022, bundled optics.

We hope you enjoyed this look at devices that very few people in the industry have seen. We’ll continue to work on taking a look at new networking hardware over the rest of this year.