Cisco Silicon One P200

8223 Router with a throughput of 51.2 Tbps makes it possible to run AI workloads across multiple data centers without any loss of performance.

Almost all readers will be familiar with the terms scale up and scale out. In short, scale up means adding extra capacity for workloads within a rack, while scale out means scaling horizontally by adding extra racks.

With the announcement of the 8223 Router and the Silicon One P200, however, Cisco is focusing on a relatively recent addition to the scaling vocabulary, namely scale across. The idea behind this is that AI models are becoming so large that they can no longer run within a single data center. As Martin Lund, EVP Common Hardware Group at Cisco, put it in conversation with us: “The demand for compute is greater than the capacity that can be delivered within a single data center. We can’t build data centers big and fast enough.”