Introduction: With Software Defined: Networking (SDN), Storage and Data Center movements firmly entrenched, one might believe there’s not much opportunity for innovation in dedicated hardware implemented in silicon. Several sessions at the 2014 Hot Interconnects conference, especially one from ARM Ltd, indicated that was not the case at all. With the strong push for open networks, chips have to be much more flexible and agile, as well as more powerful, fast and functionally dense. Of course, there are well known players for specific types of silicon. For example: Broadcom for switch/routers; ARM for CPU cores (also Intel and MIPS/Imagination Technologies), many vendors for System on a Chip (SoC)- which includes 1 or more CPU core(s)-mostly from ARM (Qualcomm, Nvidia, Freescale, etc), and Network Processors (Cavium, LSI-Avago/Intel, PMC-Sierra, EZchip, Netronome, Marvell, etc), bus interconnect fabrics (Arteris, Mellanox, PLX /Avago, etc). What’s not known is how these types of components, especially SoC’s, will evolve to support open networking and software defined networking in telecom equipment (i.e. SDN/NFV). Some suggestions were made during presentations and a panel session at this year’s excellent Hot Interconnects conference. We summarize three invited Hot Interconnects presentations related to network silicon in this article. Our follow on Part II […]
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