Comment by throwaway000002
9 years ago
I posted this after reading the various posts regarding Barefoot Networks exiting stealth⁰.
They've (jointly?) developed P4 and have tooling to compile it down to their new switch silicon, Tofino.
Hard to say exactly how impressive all this is considering how price sensitive and competitive merchant silicon is.
They could, for example, have glued a large FPGA to a huge amount of network I/O and then developed a P4 compiler to their FPGA fabric. Who knows?
P4 seems to be attempting to be a CUDA for switching, except more open. Barefoot, I presume, is betting on producing the most efficient, by whatever metric, hardware implementation of it.
⁰https://hn.algolia.com/?query=barefoot%20networks&sort=byDat...
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