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Is Hyperchip Hype?
Peter Galbraith writes "There was an interview on CBC (here in Canada) last evening about
Hyperchip, a Montreal-based
company that are working on a new type of router that would scale up 1000 times in traffic (so wouldn't be obsolete in less than a year) and would pass packets to their destination in a few hops instead of a dozen or more. Any experts out there think it's hype? Or real?"
The explanation on Hyperchip's "technology" page is pretty thin, but considering they just raised $70 million, I hope they've given more convincing details to their investors.
I was at a Pub one evening (I live in Montreal) and I happened to meet their sales manager... ms. Jen Goldfinch. Although I had seen the Hyperchip building on many occasions, I had never inquired as to what they do. After meeting this woman, I was given the impression that their routers are actually in use by some of the big players in the digital pipelines game. She was actually pretty clear on that, although I can't seem to find any exact information concerning their customers on their website. Perhaps some questions to nortel, and qwest folks might clear this up. The only thing that make me dubious about her claim of widespread adoption, would be that if their products are so much "better" (for the lack of a better word) than the competitions, then why is abilene using cisco products? Unfortunately I don't have that kind of time on my hands.
they claim to have 41 patents issued... I found 3:
I/O and memory bus system for DFPS and units with two or multi-dimensional programmable cell architectures
Efficient direct replacement cell fault tolerant architecture
Fault tolerant data processing system fabricated on a monolithic substrate
From these it appears they are fabricating wafers with lots of semi-independent processing nodes, which are tolerant of failures of some of the nodes (and can therefore take into account chip production glitches on part of the wafer).
This could give them a potentially large performance advantage, if they can do it right.
That makes their product different. With Cisco gear, you have a very, very small number of high speed ports available to you in one chassis (and several of these "capabilities" are eaten up when you go with redundant solutions).
The idea behind Hyperchip, that is a supposedly better implementation than Avichi's that preceeded it, is to have a packet switching backplane that is expandable to multiple bays, as opposed to the tiny boxes such as the cisco 12000. Since it is a common backplane, there are fewer "hops".
The real limit is power. The Avici systems used over 400 amps of three phase power per bay, and (I believe) scaled to 16 bays, each one capable of running over 60 OC-192s at line speed.
Hyperchip's unit looks better.
Right now, their just trying to figure out how to market it, and how they can add services inside the box that you wouldn't get otherwise. Think of all the stuff you would like to do to streams of that size, but just can't. Also, think of what to do with packets that are going to full pipes. At OC-192 speeds, you can't hold on to packets. There isn't enough time to put it in to memory.
PS OC-192 can carry approximately 10 Gb/s. Or, over 1.2GB/s (this isn't ethernet, it's sonet) (but will have 10 Gb ethernet interfaces, but they just can't carry as much)
At 10 Gb/s, a 1600 byte packet (for those ethernet fans out there) is on the wire (going across a fixed point)for 160 nanoseconds.