Fixing the X86 Problem

Much like the IBM Mainframes that preceded it, the x86 architecture is getting long in the tooth. While still ubiquitous across enterprise and consumer devices, the once standard architecture is seeing competition at all sides, as performance scaling and process enhancements have slowed. Chris Evans highlight Persando’s presentation from Cloud Field Day as an example of this. They use an ARM-based SmartNIC that can be programmed with P4 to offload network functions workloads from x86 and realize substantial performance gains. Chris sees the further disaggregation of compute, networking and storage as a result of these kind of innovative offload solutions.

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