Virtual machines are very much a thing now, and virtualisation has made it into network cards reasonably well ... but pretty well nothing else.
In our future datacentre we want to say how many cores, connected to how much ram, how much GPU resource, some NVME etc. etc. and there's going to be a whole lot of very specialised switching and tunnelling going on. This needs to be as close to the cores/cache as possible, a good order of magnitude faster than we run our present networking stuff, and probably an area where there will be a significant pace of development ie a software defined solution would be nice.
So, a software defined north bridge, in essence. And an FPGA is pretty much the only thing we have right now that could do the job.
In our future datacentre we want to say how many cores, connected to how much ram, how much GPU resource, some NVME etc. etc. and there's going to be a whole lot of very specialised switching and tunnelling going on. This needs to be as close to the cores/cache as possible, a good order of magnitude faster than we run our present networking stuff, and probably an area where there will be a significant pace of development ie a software defined solution would be nice.
So, a software defined north bridge, in essence. And an FPGA is pretty much the only thing we have right now that could do the job.