Broadcom debuts first single-ship 100Gbit Ethernet chip

Broadcom Corp. Tuesday (April 24) announced its fourth-generation Ethernet network processor, which it claims is the industry's first chip to use massive parallelism by virtue of its 64 packet-processing cores running at one gigahertz. Providing full-duplex 100Gbit per second performance, it can also be configured to provide a dozen 10-Gbit channels.

"By 2015, there will be twice as many devices connected to the Internet as there are people in the world, many of which will be streaming video," said Dan Harding, senior director of marketing, infrastructure and networking at Broadcom. "As a result of this increasing demand for bandwidth, the core of the network is going to need upgrading to 100Gbit Ethernet over the next four years."