4 ms·
Never heard of Broadcom. Are they like the private equity of tech? Kind of sounds like it.
by xyst 3y ago
Never heard of Broadcom. Are they like the private equity of tech? Kind of sounds like it.
- inputError 3y ago[dead]
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoYou almost certainly have Broadcom in your pocket.
- latchkey 3y agoThese bits absolutely traveled through a Broadcom NIC.
- Cyph0n 3y agoAs someone who worked on SP routers at Cisco - yes to the above.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- ikiris 3y agoMuch to the regret of anyone trying to manage them. Cheap is nice, but I miss the days when chips did things you wanted.
- zaat 3y agoSome other bits were silently discarded by same Broadcom NIC, no particular reason given and no event wasn't registered
- latchkey 3y agoThankfully we have TCP retransmission.
- pavon 3y agoBroadcom was essentially bought by a private equity firm who took the name as the name of the umbrella corporation. Before that Broadcom was (and still is) one of the larger communication hardware companies, making chips for cell, wifi, bluetooth, ethernet and ARM SoCs, along with telecom and data center boxes that used these chips. You almost certainly have their hardware in some device you own. But they have always had difficulty competing with Qualcomm, arguably in part due to anticompetitive behavior from the later. After the acquisition, they have been acquiring enterprise software companies to diversify, including CA Technologies (think Atlassian/Oracle of the mainframe world), Symantec, and now VMWare.
- antod 3y agoWow, I didn't know that. They even Computer Associated Computer Associates. That is like an exponential vortex of suck.
- gpvos 3y agoMaybe they absorbed a bit too much of CA culture.
- dredmorbius 3y agoI had totally missed CA being bought by Broadcom. Given that CA already had the reputation of "where software goes to die", this is ... bad news for VMWare. (I'd heard that description from many in the tech field, including from a CEO who's previous venture had been acquired by CA.) I also hadn't realised that Broadcom itself had originated at HP.
- pavon 3y agoBroadcom didn't originate at HP, it was an early 90's startup. What happened is that a private equity firm bought some parts of HP that had been spun off and then that company later bought Broadcom.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
- megous 3y agoBroadcom is chip maker for Raspberry Pi, among many other things, that's the one most people here probably will recognize it for.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- barkingcat 3y agowikipedia has a great article on broadcom - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom Its history goes back to the 1960's. It is a major semiconductor company that I would say, was part of the ecosystem that made computers and networks possible. You haven't heard of them because they make too much of everything that makes the fabric of everyday computing. It's like how you would never really know of the company who made the pipes for your toilet/plumbing.
- jacquesm 3y agoBroadcom is the reason there are a few hundred drivers for minor variations of the networking chipset in your laptop, each of them incompatible with all of the others.
- swiftcoder 3y agoThe mostly specialise in network adapters and low-performance mobile chipsets - the cheaper Kindle tables and Fire TV boxes all ran on broadcom.