Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray discuss the new Tofino 2 ASIC from Barefoot Networks. This ASIC boasts 12.8Tbps total throughput, which puts it on par with silicon from providers such as Broadcom and Innovium.

Barefoot’s compelling differentiator is that Tofino offers a fully programmable packet-processing pipeline. Using the open-source P4 language, Tofino customers can customize how the ASIC processes packets, add or remove features, and create their own programs to run on the switch.

Small Is Beautiful

The Tofino 2 is made with the 7nm process, giving it more transistors in the same die area and greater power efficiency compared to Tofino 1, which uses the 16nm process. Barefoot says the new chip offers a 50% improvement in packets per second per watt.

Port options include 32X400GbE, 128x100GE, or 256×10/25/50GE on a single chip.

Barefoot Tofino is available through ODMs. Version 1 of the ASIC is also available from Cisco (the Nexus 34180YC) and Arista (the 7170).

Barefoot says the Tofino 2 will sample to customers in the first half of 2019.

Learn More

Tofino 2 – Barefoot Networks

BiB 017: Barefoot Networks Introduces Deep Insight – Packet Pushers

Barefoot Releases P4 Studio To Streamline Tofino ASIC Programming – Packet Pushers

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