Cloud

Arista Runs Barefoot With Tofino Programmable Switch Chips

If Andy Bechtolsheim, the chief technology officer at datacenter switching upstart Arista Networks, wanted to design ASICs to try to take a bigger piece of the switch pie – or more precisely, thought that this was a good idea at all – rest assured, Arista would be spending money engineering its own chips and fighting for capacity at the four remaining foundries that have advanced processes.

Cloud

Getting Logical About Cavium ThunderX2 Versus Intel Skylake

Any processor that hopes to displace the Xeon as the engine of choice for general purpose compute has to do one of two things, and we would argue both: It has to be a relatively seamless replacement for a Xeon processor inside of existing systems, much as the Opteron was back in the early 2000s, and it has to offer compelling advantages that yield better performance per dollar per watt per unit of space in a rack.