First Nividia announced it was to acquire Mellanox. Now Xilinx announces the acquisition of Solarflare. These are the two big sources of expertise in the high capability, high throughput Network Interface Card market.
When this sort of consolidation happens, it’s a signal to watch for one or more smaller players to emerge, potentially with expertise and money coming from the acquired companies, to develop the next state change in one of the often overlooked but critical enablers of the very large scale datacenters enabling cloud operational scale.
The competition is AWS, who have built their own ASIC, used in the NICs in the Nitro System. James Hamilton describes the system, used for I/O acceleration, security, and to implement a hypervisor.
February 2019 https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2019/02/aws-nitro-system/
March 2019 https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-mellanox-for-6-9-billion
April 2019 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/xilinx-to-acquire-solarflare-300837025.html
Cunning Systems 