Hi Everyone,
I heard the news that Intel decided to stop the development of tofino switch chips. I am like to ask if there are other programmable switches (P4 or other programming languages are fine) that have similar capabilities to Intel Tofino that I could take a look at?
First of all, let me try to clarify the situation and what has been announced. Intel has made the decision to stop further development of Tofino switch ASICs, indeed. However, Intel also decided to continue producing, selling and supporting existing Tofino™ Family ASICs. namely Tofino and Tofino2. Furthermore, Intel decided to continue developing, supporting and enhancing P4 Studio™ SDE software that supports these devices.
Therefore, if you are interested in developing your code on a P4-programmable switch, you can still do it with Tofino or Tofino2. If you belong to an academic or research organization, feel free to learn about Intel Connectivity Research Program and apply – it is also alive an well.
Personally, I am not aware of any other P4-programmable switching ASICs that would be competitive with Tofino in terms of both features and performance. There are other P4-programmable targets, like SmartNICs and FPGAs, not to mention software targets, which are all actively developed, but as I said they are in a different class, compared to Tofino. If you find a comparable switching ASIC, please post here to let the community know.
Happy hacking,
Vladimir