If you want for the rapid pace of innovation in datacenter networking to continue, then you had better hope that the hyperscalers and major public cloud builders don’t run out of money. …
Last fall, supercomputer maker Cray announced that it was getting back to making high performance cluster interconnects after a six year hiatus, but the company had already been working on its “Rosetta” switch ASIC for the Slingshot interconnect for quite a while before it started talking publicly about it. …
The handwriting has been on the wall for some time now, but Intel has quietly dropped its 200 Gb/sec Omni-Path networking from its roadmaps and will be using other technology for interconnects going forward. …
It is hard to say what will happen first: Switching and routing will merge, or an independent networking operating system that can do both will emerge. …
Without the right kind and the right amount of I/O between the components of a system, all of the impressive feeds and speeds of the individual components don’t amount to more than a pile of silicon and sheet metal. …
Hyperscalers change their datacenters – by which we mean whole generations of servers, storage, and switching – like regular enterprises upgrade server platforms. …
In one fell swoop, Intel has finally filled a giant hole in its switching product line by acquiring upstart Barefoot Networks, the creator of the P4 programming language for networking devices and the “Tofino” family of Ethernet switch ASICs that make use of it. …
More and more of the networking that is done in the datacenter is performed on software-defined networking whiteboxes rather than on proprietary black box machinery that was controlled by one supplier. …
The commercial realization of artificial intelligence has companies scrambling to develop the next big hardware technology breakthrough for this multi-billion dollar market. …
If you want to see what real competition might look like at some point in the future of the server racket, look no further than the Ethernet switch market, where switch ASICs and the companies that build switches alike have to fight for every dollar and make it up in volume every year without pause. …
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