Setting The Stage For 1.6T Ethernet, And Driving 800G Now

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2024-02-11 02:00:08

Marvell has had a large and profitable I/O and networking silicon business for a long time, but with the acquisitions of Inphi in October 2020 and of Innovium in August 2021, the company is building a credible networking stack that can take on Broadcom, Cisco Systems, and Nvidia for the $1.3 billion or so in switch chips sold into the datacenter each year, which is growing at about 15 percent a year to more than $2 billion by 2026.

The rise of Marvell among the hyperscalers and cloud builders has made it unattractive for Intel to stay in the switch ASIC market with the Barefoot Networks “Tofino” family of programmable switch chips, which it just put out to pasture in January as part of its huge cost-cutting maneuvers.

Everyone makes their choices in an intensively competitive datacenter silicon market, and even Marvell, which acquired Arm server chip maker Cavium back in November 2017 and then mothballed its “Triton” ThunderX3 line in the summer of 2020, has had to make some tough choices.

With Amazon Web Services making its own Graviton Arm server chips and Ampere Computing coming out aggressively with a chip designed more for cloud builders and hyperscalers, and AMD aggressively broadening its Epyc X86 server chip line with many-core designs starting with “Bergamo” Epycs and Intel following suit with “Sierra Forest” Xeon XPs, Marvell was prescient (or had good competitive intelligence) and backed out of ThunderX – although if you want to license it to do a custom part, Marvell would love to talk to you.