The Cisco 8200 Series is designed for roles requiring higher scale and external deep buffers. To achieve similar routed bandwidth and scale, other industry routers require multiple devices such as off-chip Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAMs), fabric ASICs, and multiple network processors. However, the Cisco 8200 Series routers use a simple single ASIC (with HBM) design without the need for off-chip TCAM.

The 8200 Series 1 and 2 RU footprints allow them to be deployed in locations that traditionally required much larger chassis and special accommodations for power and cooling. Provisioning up to 12.8 Tbps in the most efficient 100G/400G-generation chassis requires over seven times the space. The 8200 Series provides tens of milliseconds of buffering and supports large forwarding tables. The ability to deploy a full-featured router into power- and space-constrained facilities such as colocation, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Internet
Exchange Points (IXPs), or older central office sites opens new possibilities for network designs. The 8200 Series with its large buffer and scale capacity is most suitable for roles such as aggregation, peering, core, and Data Center Interconnects (DCIs).

The Cisco 8200 Series offers five different variants: Cisco 8201-SYS with 24 ports of 400GbE and 12 ports of 100GbE in a compact 1RU form factor, Cisco 8202-SYS with 60 ports of 100GbE and 12 ports of 400GbE in a 2RU from factor, Cisco 8201-24H8FH with 24 ports of 100GbE and 8 ports of 400GbE in a compact 1RU form factor, Cisco 8201-32FH with 32 ports of 400GbE in a compact 1RU form factor and Cisco 8202-32FH-M with 32 ports of 400GbE with MACsec in a 2RU form factor.
The 8200 Series supports both IOS XR software on all 8200 and the open-source network operating system SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) on 8201-32FH-O.