Comment
Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Good place to start. And we fully realize that it takes a whole different set of skills to design a packet processing engine wrapped by SerDes than it takes to design and I/O and memory hub wrapped by a bunch of cores. (But when you say it that way. . . )A little history is in order, we think. It all starts with Galileo Technology, which was founded in 1993 by Avigdor Willenz to focus on – wait for it – developing a high performance MIPS RISC CPU for the embedded market. This chip Galileo created ended up being used mostly in data communications gear, and was eventually augmented with designs based on PowerPC cores, which eventually came to rule the embedded market before Arm chips booted them out. In 1996, Galileo saw an opportunity and pivoted to create the GalNet line of Ethernet switch ASICs for LANs (launched in 1997) and eventually extended that to the Horizon ASICs for WANs. At the height of the dot-com boom in early 2000, Willenz cashed out and sold Galileo to Marvell for $2.7 billion.Among the many companies that Willenz has invested in with that money and helped propel up and to the right was Habana Labs, the AI accelerator company that Intel bought for $2 billion in 2019, the above mentioned Ethernet switch ASIC maker Xsight Labs, and Annapurna Labs, which ended up inside of AWS. Guy Koren, Erez Sheizaf, and Gal Malach, who all worked at EZChip, a DPU maker that was eaten by Mellanox to create its SmartNICs and that is now at the heart of Nvidia’s DPU strategy, founded Xsight Labs. (Everybody knows everybody in the Israeli chip business.) Willenz is the link between them all, and has a vested interest in flipping Xsight Labs just as he did Galileo Technology and Annapurna Labs (and no doubt hopes to do with distributed flash block storage maker Lightbits Labs, where Willenz is chairman and investor).Provided the price is not too high, it seems just as likely to us that AWS will buy the Xsight Labs team as it is to be building its own team from scratch. And if not, then maybe AWS has considered buying Innovium, which is also putting 400 Gb/sec Ethernet ASICs into the field. With its last round of funding, Innovium reached unicorn status, so its $1.2 billion valuation might be a little rich for AWS’s blood. A lot depends on how much traction Innovium can get selling Teralynx ASICs outside of whatever business we suspect that it is already doing with AWS. Oddly enough, that last round of money may make Innovium too expensive for AWS to buy.If you put a gun to our heads, we think AWS is definitely going to do its own network ASICs. It is just a matter of time for economic reasons that include the company’s desire to vertically integrate core elements of its stack. This may or may not be the time, despite all the rumors going around. Then
Add Comment