Merchant silicon competition

Figure 1: Open Network Platform Switch Reference Design (see Intel Product Brief)

Rose Schooler's keynote at the recent Open Networking Summit described Intel's new reference switch platform. Intel merchant silicon addresses network virtualization and SDN use cases through support for open standards, including: OpenFlow,  NVGRE, VxLAN and sFlow.

Figure 2: Top of rack using Broadcom merchant silicon (from Merchant silicon)

Intel appears to be targeting Broadcom's postion as merchant silicon provider in the data center switch market. Just as competition between Intel, AMD and ARM has spurred innovation, increased choice, and driven down CPU prices, competition between merchant silicon vendors promises similar benefits.

In the compute space, the freedom to choose operating systems (Windows, Linux, Solaris etc.) increases competition among hardware vendors and between operating system vendors. Choices in switch operating system are starting to appear (PicOS and the open source Switch Light project), opening the door to disruptive change in the networking market that is likely to mirror the transition from proprietary minicomputers to commodity x86 servers that occurred in the 1980's.