Barefoot "Tofino": 6.4 Tbps whitebox switch silicon?

Thu Jun 16 06:05:50 UTC 2016

On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 8:31 PM, Ca By <cb.list6 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, June 15, 2016, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > a lot of PR fluff, but this may be of interest:
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.wired.com/2016/06/barefoot-networks-new-chips-will-transform-tech-industry/
> >
> >
> >
> https://barefootnetworks.com/media/white_papers/Barefoot-Worlds-Fastest-Most-Programmable-Networks.pdf
> >
> >
> > Based on their investors, could have interesting results for much lower
> > cost 100GbE whitebox switches.
> >
>
> Where is the price tag? Why would you think it is inexpensive?
>
> I do think p4 is very interesting, but is it really much different from
> openflow?

Great question!

OpenFlow enabled decoupling of the control plane from the data plane,
whereas P4 allows you to define the data plane. Check out this popular P4
program that defines the data plane of a L2/L3 switch -
https://github.com/p4lang/switch/tree/master/p4src

OpenFlow is a protocol, whereas P4 is a programming language. You can use
OpenFlow controller to control a P4 data plane - Check out this OpenFlow
agent on top of a P4 data plane - https://github.com/p4lang/p4ofagent

Check out this blog post which explains the differences between P4 and
OpenFlow quite well -
http://p4.org/p4/clarifying-the-differences-between-p4-and-openflow/