Light Readingin haaleahko vastaanotto FP5 -uutuudelle:
NOKIA’S FP5 CHIP TAPS INTO SECURITY AND ENERGY FEARS
Nokia’s FP4 was always going to be a hard act to follow. Launched in 2017 at a glitzy event in San Francisco, the 2.4Tbit/s network processor was hailed as the fastest ever, six times more powerful than anything else on the market. Since then, the Internet Protocol (IP) equipment it feeds has remained a strong performer for Nokia, with sales up 15% for the first six months on a constant-currency basis. Today’s release of the FP5 is certainly a more subdued affair, one that seems to befit the age of pandemics, geopolitical ruction and climate crisis. Gone are the splashy headlines about leapfrogging design generations, beating rivals and making inroads with the Internet giants. Power efficiency and security, the main selling points now, speak more quietly to concerns about energy costs and cybercrime.
There is no chatter this time around, however, about sales to webscale giants, which featured prominently in a discussion about the FP4. Back then, Steve Vogelsang, Nokia’s chief technology officer for IP and optical networks, said that the development of the FP4 had been driven largely by webscale requirements. Nokia’s engineers even appeared to have engaged with those firms in designing the FP4.
Adams insists the FP5 is a “great offer” for webscale operators that want the same “deterministic performance” as Nokia’s traditional customer base. What’s clear, though, is that merchant silicon, rather than purpose-built chips, is satisfying a lot of the webscale demand. Nokia began catering to this market as recently as July 2020, when it unveiled a switching line of products aimed at hyperscalers and announced Apple as a customer. But the mainstream market’s need for purpose-built silicon remains strong, according to Adams. “We have identified there is a specific requirement for a type of silicon that has deterministic performance,” she says. “If you have to do quality-of-service assurance for end customers that are paying for it, it has to be bulletproof. It is a different set of requirements.”
Analysts sound less convinced that purpose-built silicon occupies an entirely different space. “In general, I think the same battle between commodity hardware and white boxes and dedicated routers continues,” says Simon Stanley, a principal consultant for Earlswood Marketing and analyst-at-large for Heavy Reading (a sister company to Light Reading). “One significant change is that proprietary routers need to work seamlessly with a wider ecosystem, including open-source software and cloud infrastructure.” Nokia announced its own support for SONiC, an open-source networking operating system based on Linux, back in May 2020, Adams points out. “In terms of open networking, the ability to provide open APIs and be managed by different systems – all that capability is built into the broader portfolio.”