In reply to Mohammad Ali Haghnegahdar.

Mohammad,

This is to address both your comments on this blog.

nPower X1 is a custom development and not an FPGA, but we do use FPGAs widely across Cisco's product portfolio. The explanation on why nPower is not in an FPGA would be the same one used for any custom development. The considerable value and benefits of an FPGA comes at the expense of cost, power, performance, levels of integration, etc. In some cases the calculus leads to an FPGA being used because those benefits carry more weight. In this case they didn't.

We try to objectively pick the right silicon solution for a product or application. As a consequence, across the breadth of Cisco's product portfolio, we develop FPGAs, ASICs, and custom silicon. My team is involved in all three. We also use merchant silicon and general purpose CPUs as appropriate. There are a large number of dimensions to the evaluation including a variety of technical and roadmap factors.

I agree with your assessment on the value of future technologies including advanced packaging and interconnects. Cisco is always working on next generation products, but we typically announce them only when production readiness is achieved.