Merchant silicon based routing, flow analytics, and telemetry
Drivers for growth describes how switches built on merchant silicon from Broadcom ASICs dominate the current generation of data center switches, reduce hardware costs, and support an open ecosystem of switch operating systems (Cumulus Linux, OpenSwitch, Dell OS10, Broadcom FASTPATH, Pica8 PicOS, Open Network Linux, etc.).The router market is poised to be similarly disrupted with the introduction of devices based on Broadcom's Jericho ASIC, which has the capacity to handle over 1 million routes in hardware (the full Internet routing table is currently around 600,000 routes).
An edge router is a very pricey box indeed, often costing anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000 per 100 Gb/sec port, depending on features in the router and not including optical cables that are also terribly expensive. Moreover, these routers might only be able to cram 80 ports into a half rack or full rack of space. The 7500R universal spine and 7280R universal leaf switches cost on the order of $3,000 per 100 Gb/sec port, and they are considerably denser and less expensive. - Leaving Fixed Function Switches Behind For Universal LeafsBroadcom Jericho ASICs are currently available in Arista 7500R/7280R routers and in Cisco NCS 5000 series routers. Expect further disruption Continue reading

To evangelize the P4 language, Barefoot wanted some hardware.