Xilinx acquisition likely gives AMD the missing pieces to overcome important NFV bottlenecks and accelerate the move towards white box networking

Many people are so focused on the AI applications that they glossed over the rather curious timing of these recent Nvidia-Mellanox, AMD-Xilinx acquisitions. Both Mellanox and Xilinx are innovators and leaders in the NFV space with their own highly accelerated and CPU-offloaded NICs, with Xillinix's foray into the space being almost as recent as its acquisition.

Intel was the first to entice AT&T and the like with their white box CPE SoC's (Xeon-D/atom Rangeley) with full crypto offload as well as its DPDK ready NIC's since it was deeply invested in the network virtualization transition from the start.

It's apparent that offloading these low-latency workloads onto NIC's with FPGA's and DMA while using kernel-bypassing data planes are where these companies are heading to grab a piece of that massive telco/enterprise IT market share.

Nvidia and AMD giving Intel direct competition I this space bodes well for the future of white box networking.