I'm not sure I agree with the author. Locally (in Kanata) there have been a lot of networking companies, including startups that have developed shiny new switc

I'm not sure I agree with the author. Locally (in Kanata) there have been a lot of networking companies, including startups that have developed shiny new switch ASICs from scratch. After having a number of conversations about the ethernet switch/nic/etc market over the years, there's one resounding theme that has been repeated over and over: Broadcom basically kills virtually every networking startup that tries to edge into their territory. The cycle that happens is basically as follows: new startup develops shiny new next generation ethernet switch ASIC. The startup demos this hard to $LARGE_SWITCH_VENDOR who goes "this is awesome!" Switch vendors dips their toe and begins the integration work. Software from the startup takes time to stabilize. Broadcom gets word that $LARGE_SWITCH_VENDOR is going to start using chips from a new startup. A large team of Broadcom sales reps descends into $LARGE_SWITCH_VENDOR handing out major discounts on the many Broadcom ASICs. Shiny new startup fails to obtain sufficient sales to break into $LARGE_SWITCH_VENDOR and folds, sometimes selling off the results of their years of development as pennies on the dollar. Sometime later, Broadcom realizes the fruit of their sales effort and has no competition. Broadcom raises prices. $LARGE_SWITCH_VENDOR regrets the lack of competition in high end switch ASICs. Ethernet switches are incredibly complex these days. That complexity makes it easy for the large established switch ASIC vendors to remain entrenched. Nobody in their right mind will develop an ethernet switch ASIC from scratch today. AMD is in a far better position to take advantage of the hardware they already own in the form of Xilinx. FPGAs can be used to build ethernet switches with far less risk than building special purpose switch ASICs. The smart money should be on AMD buying established IP from a vendor that already runs on Xilinx FPGAs and using cheap Xilinx FPGAs to enter into more of the data center market. Being programmable is an advantage, and the small power penalty can be overcome by that.