Barefoot Networks came out of stealth mode on June 14, 2016.
They announced the Tofino that is a fully programmable switch ASIC
that permits the switch to be defined by the P4 programming language.
From the press release:
Barefoot's Tofino. switch chip processes packets at 6.5 terabits per second, twice as fast as the previous record holder. While maintaining record-breaking speeds, the Tofino switch chip is also fully programmable. This allows network owners to specify the behavior of the packet processing devices in their network -- down to the packets flowing on the wire. For the first time, network owners and their system vendors can determine precisely how packets are processed. By eliminating the tyranny of fixed-function switch chips, Barefoot's Tofino empowers software developers to program their network in much the same way they program a computer.
Orderable products appeared at the OpenCompute Summit in 2017.
A slide lifted from the 2019 OCP Summit shows product wins for barefoot:
June 10, 2019
Barefoot has agreed to sell itself to Intel. Expected to close Q3 2019.
Nick McKowen presented a keynote at 2019 ONF that contained this slide that shows
very fine grained buffer stats possible by programming meassurement capability
into the ASIC. McKeown said in the talk that the time span represented on the x-axis
is about a microsecond.
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