Linley Wire: August 23, 2016
Chelsio’s Terminator Takes on 100GbE
By Loring Wirbel
Chelsio Communications has populated its unified adapter for high-speed Ethernet with several generations of its Terminator controller chip. The newest wrinkle, the T6, pares the number of MAC blocks from four to two, but the MACs each add 100GbE to the previous generation’s GbE, 10GbE, and 40GbE speeds (they also support the nascent 25GbE and 50GbE standards).
In addition, the new T6 controller brings a wide bulk-encryption suite to a roster of existing offload capabilities. The T6’s ability to pursue new vertical markets such as Windows Server 2016/Azure Stack and GPU pooling for machine intelligence is unlikely to change Chelsio’s present market, where 50% of all sales currently go into storage architectures.
Chelsio’s competitive environment has narrowed since the launch of the T4 controller five years ago. At the time, Emulex, Intel, Mellanox, and QLogic were all 10GbE competitors. Since then, Avago acquired Emulex and now sells Emulex Ethernet and Fibre Channel adapters under the Broadcom brand. QLogic, whose Ethernet line got a midlife kicker through the company’s purchase of the Broadcom NetXtreme II adapters, agreed in June to be acquired by Cavium. Mellanox, meanwhile, focused its newest controller design on InfiniBand, while Intel is addressing multihost controllers through its new Red Rock Canyon.
Chelsio stands to gain share in a market that has narrowed to QLogic’s FastLinq and Mellanox’s ConnectX family. But the remaining players will aggressively cut prices for volume data-center applications. Chelsio must move quickly to its next-generation process node and Terminator chip or risk sacrificing both profitability and market share.
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