One of my relatives is a high level Barefoot employee who was integrated into Intel leadership after the acquisition. I was told that it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs. It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot. Not that the founders and CEO care, they got their money!

The whole thing definitely seems symptomatic of Intel's extreme caution. I wonder why they didn't apply the same caution when buying Barefoot. Intel obviously didn't have a great idea on how to leverage them.

This is all in stark contrast to AMD buying Pensando, a company that my SO works for. It makes sense for AMD to acquire Pensando to expand their data center offerings and compete directly with Intel. I think AMD made a smart buy.

I was a part-time contractor for Barefoot, and came along for the ride during the acquisition, so I have some first-hand knowledge of this. I am very much out of the managerial loop so I have no insight into the actual motives for killing the project, but I can tell you that at least one of the founders cared very much and fought tooth and nail to keep it alive.

> It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot

Acquiring companies in order to kill them is a horrible business practice but not unusual. The thing that makes no sense to me is why they kept it going for three years before killing it. If they bought it in order to kill it, they should have done that before spending another hundred million on it.

> The thing that makes no sense to me is why they kept it going for three years before killing it.

Internal politics?

Presumably the internal team(s) with overlap were against the acquisition.

But it was likely easier to see if the integration failed on its own before spending the political capital to kill it.

Folks forget executives at large companies usually optimize for "my career" over "the company."

They might have discouraged alternatives to pop-up. 'Oh Intel has this in the pipeline, it's hopeless to compete, let's invest in something else'. I've heard this so many times, just to see Intel kill said product, product-line. ..

At this point, if it's not about x86 cpus, listening to Intel's roadmaps seems foolish.

Perhaps having plausible deniability that they didn't acquire a competitor just to kill it was worth that extra hundred million?

Why on earth should Intel care about having plausible deniability about that? Buying a company in order to kill it is not illegal. It isn't even considered unethical except by a few utopian idealists. It's a common and accepted practice in the business world.

Antitrust laws are a thing, you know. Buying out your competition in order to get rid of them is indeed illegal, once you get big enough.

You get rid of your competition either way, though - either the competing products are now part of your offerings, or they're no longer sold. Either situation leads to the same level of reduced competition.

> it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs

So insane. It's always better in invent the next big thing that changes the market than a competitor, even if it kills another product of your own.

The customer reaction to this decision spoke volumes. The official reason given is margins compared to hardware such as the IPU but, personally, I chalk it up to turf wars. Barefoot had a distinct culture to Intel's other networking units. There is a reason many of its engineers ended up at FAANGs and not other semiconductor companies.