Barefoot "Tofino": 6.4 Tbps whitebox switch silicon?

Thu Jun 16 08:19:13 UTC 2016

On 16 June 2016 at 06:21, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke at gmail.com> wrote:
> Based on their investors, could have interesting results for much lower
> cost 100GbE whitebox switches.

Why lower cost? The BOM isn't the expensive part, the code is the
expensive part. Only way I see this happening, is if we get open
source routing suite for the box, i.e. 0 cost software.

If you're thinking of writing your own routing suite, even if your
requirements are trivial, it's still probably take 2-3 years and
+2MUSD in salaries, and then maintenance +300kUSD/year in salaries.
Need quite significant annual unit number scale to make it cheap.

I'm quite fascinated by the idea of doing something really novel in
routing suite space, but I don't see how it could possibly work
commercially. How many customers would there be for licensing COTS
routing-suite when costs are millions annually to develop it for
general use-case.

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  ++ytti