Comment by dfex
2 days ago
Am I mistaken or has Intel pretty much shelved the Tofino switching hardware that supports P4 in the first place?
I seem to recall Oxide having to switch suppliers over this?
2 days ago
Am I mistaken or has Intel pretty much shelved the Tofino switching hardware that supports P4 in the first place?
I seem to recall Oxide having to switch suppliers over this?
Yes, Intel canceled Tofino two years ago.
I'm not complaining but it's weird that they're open sourcing the SDK now. Maybe it's to support Mount Evans.
Releasing dead software that is used only to support dead hardware?
At least you can still make use of that hardware, many companies should take note of this. You can make hardware and software that doesn't die once someone pulls the plug on the other side.
Still, of course it would've been better to have released it sooner.
I think half of Tofino's complexity was in their compiler. So it may inspire new hardware vendors to reuse it in some contexts.
That's fair enough.
This was the post by Bryan Cantrill of Oxide on the Tofino saga with Intel
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/12/08/why-gelsinger-was-wr...
I also was told tofino was looking EOL. Like NUC, dropped from some C suites KPI set and longterm roadmap.
I'd love to be wrong, this is just what people said.
However, NUC form factor is more lively than ever before. Maybe someone can grab the language and run for something? Miktrotik guys come into my mind.
It’s complicated. The NUCs had a lot of inevitable catastrophic hardware failures, like NIC ports that would break. Their problem is they were not good.
3 replies →
NUC somewhat avoided the google^Wintel graveyard - they sold at least the branding to Asus.
NUCs are shifting completely to ASUS who is going to continue working on them and there are some long term commitments (there are industrial variants for example)
Apropos:
https://github.com/oxidecomputer/tofino
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tofino-2/
They didnt switch supplier iirc they are still using Tofino since it is is still a capable hardware and they see it being useful for years to come
They spoke on their podcast (I think it was there?) about ditching Tofino for the next generation of the Oxide computer. So it sounds like the current model will always ship with Tofino, but due to no future product development they won't use it again in a new machine. It sounded like they had just secured a replacement for the future but I can't remember who it was.
We've talked about it a bunch, most recently when talking about Intel after Gelsinger.[0] I went into more detail on Intel's total mishandling of Tofino in my blog entry describing why Gelsinger was the wrong choice to lead Intel in 2021.[1]
As you might imagine, this move from Intel is something that we at Oxide have advocated for strenuously -- and it is a tremendous tribute to the former Tofino team at Intel that this got done. As I hope I made clear in my blog entry: the folks working on Tofino at Intel have been great to work with; they deserved much better than their (former) executive leadership.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/intel-after...
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/12/08/why-gelsinger-was-wr...
4 replies →
P4 has more or less gone nowhere. Tofino was a full generation behind and didn’t make sense. P4 was compelling because people thought they’d solve the Elephant flow problem with traffic engineering in P4 but the resources to actually do this at scale never materialized for many reasons.
ehh scream SDN 5 times. kinda miss the 2010’s now.
cisco silicon one uses p4 fwiw. internal development though, but the language makes sense for what the things are.
do they expose the p4 functionality externally? ive heard this from them but never actually seen the proof - it seems like vaporware
1 reply →