Unfortunately, there will be none of the promising developments that the acquisition of Barefoot Networks laid the groundwork for.
Back in 2019, Intel bought a company called Barefoot Networks, and with the acquisition they obtained the basis of the Tofino programmable network switches. These were quite serious solutions at the industry level, and the giant company from Santa Clara also demonstrated a solution using silicon photonics in connection with further developments.
The big breakthrough would have been the Tofino 3, which was designed as a programmable switch offering 64 times 400 gigabit Ethernet, thereby providing a total of 25.6 terabits/second of communication. Unfortunately, this can only be talked about in the past tense, because it will never be completed. Intel has mowed down the entire Tofino product range, and the resources freed up will be regrouped to IPUs (Infrastructure Processing Units).
The company will continue to provide product support for previously released solutions, with the change only new Tofino hardware will not be released. It is not known how much cost Intel can save by killing the business, probably not very much, but it looks like every cent counts for the company right now.
