P4 - The Next Platform

Programming The Network With Intel NEX Chief Nick McKeown

August 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan 0

It would be very difficult indeed to find a better general manager for Intel’s newly constituted Network and Edge Group networking business than Nick McKeown, and Pat Gelsinger, the chief executive officer charged with turning around Intel’s foundries and its chip design business, is lucky that Intel was on an acquisitive bend in the wake of its rumored failed attempt to buy Mellanox and Nvidia’s successful purchase of Mellanox a few months later. …

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AMD Needs To Complete The Datacenter Set With Switching

June 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan 3

In the past several decades, data processing and storage systems could be architected from best of breed components, and the market could – and did – sustain multiple suppliers of competing technologies in each of the categories of compute, networking, and storage. …

Intel Finally Serious About Switching with Barefoot Networks Buy

June 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan 6

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. …

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Programmable Networks Get a Bigger Foot In The Datacenter Door

December 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan 1

Barefoot Networks is on a mission, and it is a simple one: To give datacenter switches the same kind of openness and programmability that X86 servers have enjoyed for decades in the datacenter. …

Programmable Networks Train Neural Nets Faster

February 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan 0

When it comes to machine learning training, people tend to focus on the compute. …

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Getting With The Program On Software Defined Networks

October 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan 0

If the profit margins are under pressure among the switch and router makers of the world, their chief financial officers can probably place a lot of the blame on Nick McKeown and his several partners throughout the years. …

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Hyperscalers Ready To Run Barefoot In The Datacenter

January 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan 0

Breaking into the switch market is not an easy task, whether you are talking about providing whole switches or just the chips that drive them. …

Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs

September 13, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan 7

No one knows for sure how pervasive deep learning and artificial intelligence are in the aggregate across all of the datacenters in the world, but what we do know is that the use of these techniques is growing and could represent a big chunk of the processing that gets done every millisecond of every day. …

The Walls Come Down On The Last Bastion Of Proprietary

June 14, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan 1

Open source software has done a lot to transform the IT industry, but perhaps more than anything else it has reminded those who architect complex systems that all elements of a datacenter have to be equally open and programmable for them to make the customizations that are necessary to run specific workloads efficiently and therefore cost effectively. …