
Why Networks Need ASICs - zxv
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1330054&
======
Animats
_" John Maddison is senior vice president of products and solutions at
Fortinet."_

It's an ad for a crypto chip.

~~~
andrewstuart2
"It's a crummy commercial!" [1]

[https://youtu.be/2-H4LT-WZWE](https://youtu.be/2-H4LT-WZWE)

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Symmetry
" _Setting aside issues like the shortage of available talent and the average
of four years to develop and bring a new ASIC to market, the material costs
alone are high. The manufacturing of a typical two-gram chip requires 1.6
kilograms of fossil fuel, 72 grams of chemicals, and 32 kilograms of water.
The materials involved in making a 32Mbit RAM chip can add up to as much as
630 times the mass of the final product._ "

You realize that this is replacing a number of general purpose chips and
reduces the new amount of materials consumed to accomplish a task, right? If
you're not spending those 72 grams of 'chemicals' on your ASIC your spending
720 on general purpose CPUs.

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daly
Actually, large data centers are using FPGAs at the network edges. The FGPA
does data compression and/or encryption. This optimizes network bandwidth and
does not tie up the CPU. I expect to see distributed network routing code so
the communication can be peer to peer with no routers. I expect to see
firewalls specific to a node (e.g. only web traffic from the traffic
splitter). I expect to security code (e.g. no exfiltration from the
confidential store-only machine).

All of this without involving the CPU... ASIC is too expensive but FPGAs are
great. Intel bought Altera (about 45% of the FPGA market) which annoys me /
excites me because I use Altera. I expect the next Gen CPUs to have an
embedded FPGA so you can make your own instructions.

~~~
mattbillenstein
ASIC is expensive at low volume, but cheaper than an FPGA at high volume, so
it depends on the application.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
From what I've heard, "high volume" is now so high that hardly anybody really
expects cost savings from "true" (i.e. new full layout, one customer) ASICs
anymore. The vast majority of "new", "custom" chips are sold to multiple
customers and/or are light customizations of existing designs.

~~~
mattbillenstein
Right, I think this has been a trend for awhile -- standard product ASICs
ending up in multiple brands of similar products.

Just the masks for manufacturing these large chips on the newer processes are
millions of dollars -- not even factoring in all the design work to get to
that point. But they achieve far higher density than you can get with an FPGA.

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virtuallynathan
Networking seems to be moving towards Programable ASICs with companies like
Barefoot Networks, Netronome, Cavium, and other developing programable network
card, switches, and routers. So yes, its Application Specific to networking,
but what the chip actually does with the packets is up the whoever buys it.

If Xilinx / Altera can get P4 to compile to their FPGAs (Xilinx has a basic
version of this), I suspect the use of FPGAs in networking will become more
widespread. FPGAs seem to get higher throughput SerDes before ASICs. Current
FPGAs have up to 144x 30Gbps SerDes.

~~~
HanW
[http://p4fpga.github.io/](http://p4fpga.github.io/)

~~~
virtuallynathan
Cool project! I read your poster from the P4 summit.

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PhantomGremlin
I was quite confused by the article. It's old news. As one of the comments
there said:

 _Custom ICs for networking were first developed decades ago. Everything from
carrier class routers to home routers contain networking ASICs. Cisco and
Juniper consume many ASICs._

~~~
wmf
The article is a rebuttal to NFV hype that proposes to run all firewalls, NAT,
IDS, IPS, DPI, VPN, SD-WAN, etc. in software.

~~~
snuxoll
As bandwidth goes up general purpose CPU's become inefficient at handling
traffic again. Hell, pfSense on my Xeon E5-2403v2 at home eats up 25% of a CPU
core WITH TSO and TCO enabled when maxing out my 100Mbps, meanwhile my
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X running on a whimpy little lower-power embedded
processor sits around 2% utilization doing the same task. This is without any
crazy firewall rules, IDS, etc, just three port forwards in place. I can't
imagine what kind of hardware I'd need to even handle a 1Gbps with software
routing, let alone handling the duties of my 24-port TP-Link switch at home
that sips ~20W of power with all ports active and can handily route (and yes,
I mean _route_ , it is a Layer 3 switch) 1mpps.

~~~
gonzo
Netmap-fwd on an atom is faster than your edge router.

And yes'm pfsense is getting some netmap/dpdk love.

I am the owner of Netgate (company behind pfsense)

And your figures ar full of shit. I do 1gbps on a 2.4GHz Atom

~~~
snuxoll
To be fair, this was running on ESXi, so there was a performance penalty to be
had there. Got really annoyed when I switched to XenServer and I had to
disable all hardware offloading (because XenServer is stupid and FreeBSD
doesn't like stupid virtio drivers) and it would regularly peg a core at 100%
when maxing out the connection, which was ultimately why I switched to a cheap
hardware solution (still eyeing the cheap ~$300 pfSense appliance, because
EdgeOS lacks a _TON_ of features I used regularly).

Edit: Netmap would be lovely.

