Will Network Processors Move Beyond Buzz in 2000? Coming year will be crucial to nascent market, analysts say BY ARIK HESSELDAHL New York—In the last year, the term network processor (NPU) has become a new industry buzzword, going hand-in-hand with visions of start-up companies and fat checks from venture capital firms. In fact, enough starry-eyed start-up companies have launched crusades to control the new mar- ket for networking processors that the big boys—in this case Intel Corp. and IBM Corp.—got into the act, apparently realizing they might miss out on what could one day be a billion-dollar market. Although 1999 has been a year for generating buzz and talking about big plans in this space, there have been precious few design wins and even fewer actual product ship- ments. And while analysts are gen- erally upbeat about the growth potential for chips optimized for networking applications, there are as yet noclear leaders in the space, but lots of interesting plans. For each firm, the problem they aim to solve can be summed up simply. The ASICs currently used by networking OEMs like Cisco Systems Inc., Nortel Net- works Corp., Lucent Technolo- gies Inc. and others work well for the applications they are designed for, but they suffer from a prob= lem that is simply unacceptable in the age of the Internet — they are difficult to upgrade as demand for new services and greater speeds increases. Further slow- ing the upgrade process is the long design time that is required for each ASIC. The solution? Design a new generation of chips that can keep up with the pace of Internet time. The chips would be: allowing for software upgrades on the fly, eliminating the need to swap out boards or entire systems toprovision new network services. {Continued on page 22]Will Network Processors Move Beyond Buzzi in 2000? land switching anymore,” said their attention to working with Peter Glaskowsky, senior analyst Hitachi. at MicroDesign Resour “There are so many people ‘Sebastopol,Cali"Therearealot doing his, wonderifthiswillend ‘fnew protocols that vendorshave up being the direction that all the {wo be able to implement in their cool design architects go in the ‘networking boxes, like virtual next few years,” he said. ‘era of the network processor ‘soundsanawfullot ike the days the media “Most ofthe parts Thave seen impor : al with neato fd then let other things be Data Corp. im Mountain View, mopped up by a general purpose —_Calif.“Itremains tobe seen exactly teas ee een ee eee Ss eases eae ere eet De pera orn tee eer Bi oti te ees cee re See ee See eee ares! eee ee ET LR SS ee eee a ae ee ee ee ee Ei ae opp oe pa Inunch inthe coming wesks and third-party development efforts Imont, wh ther major semt- with $200 mio ear ap Snducor fms may jmp nto talon. thetay aswel Laney Sse pes Gintkoweky hited that plans of Ageres anion Plsrece areinplceforsroupof dein. tress oe offloading rs toleave a major desktop “Teprfonm cern nctions eerste eaeey Ma ele, Sctwork proce startup and atthe layer Sanday leven Other inlading those alveady then you can tse thei forward eeilnia eetaeeaec. car testen cis spece,scknoviodgs cy cid wetdng ngs fsa evs mp ito nctwork proceng st routing tank he sad. well Equator Techolopcs Ine," Agere'sarchestespitito hichiasedealwihFiech Lad two mal paisa fst pattern {0 develop media procewor for _procemo tata dta ome ‘cttopbocesandtbermulime: PHY chip and prone prtocl Sa a areca Port, whose designers apparently believe in solving networking problems with otsofmuscle.The ‘erGroup Dataquest in San Jose. ‘When itannounceditsnetwork processor, IBM named C-Port as ne te Wis ined eats te development of applications ‘within several network layers To thatend,thetwoare involved with Sitera illsitsofferingasanet- ‘workaeceleration platform, which boasts an amount of processing ‘headroom that will allow for far ther additions tonetwork services via software. The architecture is [SS ‘cbathe overall processing power ‘behind their infrastructures very eh end: f hee suecesfl they'll be [Asics from {Stand IBN “T-Sqware sone of the fist net- work processor developersto sign ‘ontowith intesIXA architecture, Billing itselfasthe only supplier of so-called “edge processors,” ‘TSqwareseesitsroleasbeingnot inthe carrer infrastructure, buton the edge of the enterprise where the backbone meets the local area network. The company in 1998 ‘unveiled two parts one the edge processor, the other atime division ‘Maker Communications focuses purely on ATM switching. “They havesome unigue ATM stuf that will help them in that ‘environment, but they don't reallyWill Network Processors Move Beyond Buzz in 2000? [Continued from page 22] ‘One thing most analysts agree on is that some consolidation in the market is inevitable, but Lavey for one doesn’texpect it to happen right away. ‘Th are so many different complexitiesin the market, there's not going to be any room for any ‘one vendor to dominate,” he said. “Obviously there’s going to be some consolidation, but I don’t it’s going tohappen assoon asalot of people expect. Because of that, ’s going to be a lot opportu- nities for these smaller players to make an impact.” But if there’s one thing each vendor considers the jackpot, i a relationship with top-tier net- working OEMs, chiefamong them Cisco Systems, a company that is currently playing the field. “Once you get past the top- five networking OEM's, you're really left with chump change,” said Glaskowsky of MicroDesign Resources. “Nor would it be worth it for anyone to design chips for anyone other than the top five. Cisco has not put their weight Revenue for Programmable Communications Processors Market Forecast (Millions of Dollars) 1000 behind anyone because they want everyone to beat themselves up and put their best efforts forward toward winning the big Cisco deal. But if Cisco is smart, they will buy all ofthese things over the next few years and come up with product lines where they can put each of these parts to see how they like them. That will give the vendors Source: Dataquest the feeling of having the relation- ship with Cisco they all want. =