Although the past two years, M & A climax chip is no longer, but vigorous abundant in the data center market, the acquisition of Arista Mojo from the second half of 2018 and Nvidia Metamako to acquire Mellanox, acquired from Xilinx Solarflare to Intel acquired Barefoot. As the star of the cyber realm, Barefoot M & As also appears to be of concern. Recently I had the honor to interview Barefoot general manager of China Zhou Gang, learn more about the latest developments of Barefoot.
1 BACK OFF traditional chip giant
For Barefoot friends do not understand, we introduce some of the Barefoot were with a small amount of space. Barefoot was founded in 2013, can be born will bring their own aura, its founder, is a professor at Stanford, SDN leader Nick McKeown, CEO is former Google senior vice president Craig Barratt. Good genes as a base, as well as programmable network chip to do the blessing, let Barefoot soon attracted investments include Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Dell Technology Capital, Goldman Sachs and other well-known institutions.
For network switching chip, ASIC chip commercial occupy absolute market share, is the emergence of Barefoot in software enabling the chip, so that the network switch chip programmable, provide more flexible service support for users. It also responded to the real Nick SDN development of early heart, helping web users get rid of the constraints are fixed chip manufacturers a variety of protocols and functions. After six years of development, Barefoot formed a technology combined with programming languages P4, programmable chip architecture PISA, compiler and tool chain P4 Studio Tofino and programmable networking chip as the core competitiveness. For details, see "Intel's logic behind the acquisition Barefoot" article
2 "barefoot" Put on boots
If Barefoot joined Intel to expand the data center market offers more opportunities, so Intel's olive branch to Barefoot also brings great help. "Intel's acquisition of Barefoot development has brought to five times the explosive force," said Fen Zhou Gangxing. Let's take a look at "barefoot" how to wear boots.