AMD - the company that bought its way into the network

What it bought is worth naming precisely, because it describes where packet processing has moved. Xilinx brought field-programmable gate arrays and the engineers who design the high-speed serialisers underneath every fast interface. Pensando brought data processing units - a network interface with a programmable packet pipeline and its own processor complex, running services that used to run on the server it is plugged into.

That is the shape of the current argument about where the network ends. A data processing unit does firewalling, encryption and virtual switching on the adapter, so the boundary between the server and the network stops being the cable and becomes a line drawn inside the card. Several of the security functions described elsewhere on this site are candidates to move there.

There is an irony in the company’s own history that the making milestones make legible. AMD’s long-serving chief executive is remembered for insisting that real men have fabs; the company later separated from its manufacturing entirely and designs silicon it does not build. The fabless milestone on this site describes the arrangement it ended up adopting.