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Frederic Cuiller
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Cisco 8201 High Level Architecture and Performance

 5 minutes read

 CISCO 8201 HIGH LEVEL ARCHITECTURE AND PERFORMANCE

INTRODUCTION

CISCO 8201 HIGH LEVEL ARCHITECTURE

L A B TO P O LO GY

R E S U LT S

CONCLUSION

Introduction

Released 2 years ago in late 2019, Cisco 8201 router has been widely adopted and deployed by service provider and
cloud customers for core and peering roles. Based on Cisco Silicon One Q100 NPU, the rst generation of this new chip
family, it provides both 400GE and 100GE port options which make it perfect for peering role in a small form factor.

This short article will rst cover Cisco 8201 high level internal architecture. Then, a quick and simple lab test will
demonstrate how it can achieve 10.8Tbps at target Non-Drop Rate (NDR). This test will address recent concerns raised
about its forwarding performance.

Cisco 8201 High Level Architecture

Cisco 8201 is the rst Cisco 8000 xed system built around a single NPU. It has 24 x QSFP56-DD 400GE and 12 x
QSFP28 100GE ports, all packed in a compact 1RU form factor. Datasheet is available here.

At the heart of Cisco 8201 is the Cisco Silicon One Q100 ASIC. This NPU is capable of forwarding 10.8Tbps at a rate of
6.6Bpps. It’s made of 216 x 56G SerDes, which can be con gured for di ering port speeds of 10G/25G/50G using NRZ
or PAM4 modulation.

The Q100 NPU architecture is built around 6 slices. Each slice handles the forwarding and feature processing for a set of
physical interfaces. All of the slices are in turn interconnected by a Shared Memory Switch (SMS).
On a xed system like Cisco 8201, the 6 slices are operating as ‘System on a Chip’ or ‘Router on a Chip’, meaning all
slices interconnect network facing interfaces:

Each slice has:

Receive and Transmit Network Processing Engines (Rx NPE and Tx NPE)

2 x Interface Group (IFG)

On the Q100, each IFG has 18 x 56G SerDes, providing 900Gbps of interface bandwidth. Each slice can forward one
packet per clock cycle, so a system build from one Q100 NPU can thus forward six packets per clock.
Let’s recap and do the math:

6 slices x 2 x IFG x 900Gbps = 10.8Tbps of available interface bandwidth

6 slices x 1.1Bpps = up to 6.6Bpps total switching rate.

A combination of HBM, SRAM and TCAM memories are used for packet bu ering and database storage.

Add a quad-core Intel CPU, 32GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD and you have a Cisco 8201.

The mapping of individual ports to slices/IFG can be checked with following command:


RP/0/RP0/CPU0:8201#sh controllers npu voq-usage interface all instance 0 location 0/RP0/CPU0
Tue Dec 7 09:50:16.205 PST

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Node ID: 0/RP0/CPU0
Intf Intf NPU Slice IFG Sys VOQ Flow VOQ Port
name handle # # # Port base base port speed
(hex) type
----------------------------------------------------------------------
FH0/0/0/0 f000138 0 0 0 4 448 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/23 f000140 0 1 0 96 464 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/22 f000148 0 1 0 92 472 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/21 f000150 0 1 1 88 480 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/20 f000158 0 1 1 84 488 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/19 f000160 0 2 0 80 496 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/18 f000168 0 2 0 76 504 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/17 f000170 0 2 1 72 512 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/16 f000178 0 2 1 68 520 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/15 f000180 0 3 0 64 528 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/14 f000188 0 3 0 60 536 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/13 f000190 0 3 1 56 544 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/12 f000198 0 3 1 52 552 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/1 f0001a0 0 0 0 8 456 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/2 f0001a8 0 0 1 12 560 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/3 f0001b0 0 0 1 16 568 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/4 f0001b8 0 5 0 20 576 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/5 f0001c0 0 5 0 24 584 0 local 400G
 FH0/0/0/6 f0001c8 0 5 1 28 592 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/7 f0001d0 0 5 1 32 600 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/8 f0001d8 0 4 1 36 608 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/9 f0001e0 0 4 1 40 616 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/10 f0001e8 0 4 0 44 624 0 local 400G
FH0/0/0/11 f0001f0 0 4 0 48 632 0 local 400G
Hu0/0/0/24 f0001f8 0 3 0 100 640 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/35 f000200 0 4 1 144 656 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/34 f000208 0 4 0 140 672 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/33 f000210 0 5 1 136 688 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/32 f000218 0 5 0 132 704 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/31 f000220 0 0 1 128 720 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/30 f000228 0 0 0 124 736 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/29 f000230 0 1 1 120 752 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/28 f000238 0 1 0 116 768 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/27 f000240 0 2 1 112 784 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/26 f000248 0 2 0 108 800 0 local 100G
Hu0/0/0/25 f000250 0 3 1 104 816 0 local 100G
RP/0/RP0/CPU0:8201#

Lab topology

A Cisco 8201 has been staged in the lab with the latest IOS-XR version available when writing this article (7.3.2). This
router is connected to 24x400G and 12x100G dedicated Spirent ports. Spirent is used to send tra c through the router
at a speci c packet size (200 bytes). It’s also used to measure total packet throughput (Gbps), frame rate (pps), packet
loss and system latency.

Spirent con guration is attached for reference:

Results

As shown in the video, the Cisco 8201 is capable of forwarding the full 10.8Tbps of tra c composed of 200bytes IPv4
packets, at the sustained rate of 6Bpps.

Cisco 8201 NDR & raw performance

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This is achieved without any single packet loss, as shown in below screenshots.

Total frame rate:

Total throughput:

No packet loss:

Average system latency is 3.3µs:

Same NDR is observed for IPv6 and MPLS tra c.

Conclusion

This article covered Cisco 8201 high level architecture. A simple lab test demonstrated raw Cisco 8201 forwarding
capacities. Current NDR for this platform is 200 bytes for IPv4, 200 bytes for MPLS and 200 bytes for IPv6. This test
con rmed Cisco Q100 performance (10.8Tbps, 6Bpps).
Seeing is believing: Cisco 8000 CPOC lab is available on dcloud. Book the lab with your account team, repeat the tests
yourself, too.
A next article will cover Cisco 8201 FIB scale and performance in real life conditions.

 Tags: Cisco 8000 iosxr Performance Scale

 Updated: December 09, 2021

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suzan − ⚑
a year ago

Hi there, in the conclusion, last line "A next article will cover Cisco 8201 FIB scale and
performance in real life conditions."
Do you have the link for that other article ?

0 0 Reply ⥅

B
Billy Tau k − ⚑
2 years ago

Hi Frederic,

Thank you for the articles, 200 Byte MTU average is small packet size for nowadays
Internet pro le (CDN, video, etc). So it is very good gures for Cisco 8000 with rst gen
chipset. I read in second it will be 30 percent more PPS (maybe hit average 150B mtu
with max throughput then)

Just read another vendor testing at 50% packet in 100B, what are they thinking those big
router for only voice tra c??

0 0 Reply ⥅

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