
Xilinx to Acquire Solarflare - shaklee3
https://www.xilinx.com/news/press/2019/xilinx-to-acquire-solarflare.html
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xvilka
Problem with Xilinx is their IDE/toolchain. Hopefully SymbiFlow[1] will take
off.

[1] [https://symbiflow.github.io/](https://symbiflow.github.io/)

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lnsru
What problem? Can you imagine some open source toolchain used in corporate
setting? Who’s supporting it? And who is liable?

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threeseed
Open source is used in every enterprise e.g.

Datastax (Cassandra), Confluent (Kafka), Oracle (MySQL), Hortonworks (Hadoop),
Databricks (Spark), Everyone (Kubernetes).

Vendors support the products but people know it's open source and potentially
liable to fail.

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ncmncm
Proprietary software companies are equally likely to fail, and take the source
code down with them. Free Software (and, to a lesser extent, Open Source) are
less risky than proprietary software.

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posnet
First Arista buys Metamako, then nvidia buys Mellanox, now Xilinx buys
Solarflare.

I wonder who will buy Exablaze?

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chx
Qualcomm to have a better datacenter offering?

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slimscsi
“low latency networking solutions for customers spanning FinTech to cloud
computing.“

Is this an HFT play?

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1e-9
It is certainly a big deal for HFT. Pulling the Solarflare networking
technology into a Xilinx FPGA should cut a significant amount of latency for
FPGA-based trading systems. Having a Solarflare IP core option should benefit
other high-performance networking applications outside of HFT as well. Seems
like a smart acquisition for Xilinx.

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willglynn
If you want an FPGA tied to a SolarFlare NIC, that's been available for years
as a finished product under the name "Application Onload Engine". News
article:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/08/solarflare_applicat...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/08/solarflare_application_onload_engine/)

Whitepapers:

* [https://solarflare.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/SF-114649-...](https://solarflare.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/SF-114649-CD-LATEST_Solarflare_AOE_SFA7942Q_Product_Brief.pdf)

* [https://solarflare.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/SF-114903-...](https://solarflare.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/SF-114903-CD-LATEST-Solarflare_Application_Nanosecond_TCP_Send_Paper.pdf)

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1e-9
Yes, but the Solarflare ApplicationOnload Engine has several issues (e.g.
limited Altera FPGA, inflexible architecture, logic on a separate ASIC that
must communicate with the FPGA, and still uses a host CPU for the networking
stack), which should be resolved by fully integrating with the Xilinx
Ultrascale+ technology and putting all networking and decision logic on one
chip. The result should be a much faster, much more flexible, and much more
powerful solution.

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saagarjha
They had their earning call today too, didn't they? One of the two seems to
have done a number on their stock price.

