Xsight Labs Why it Matters Together

Eric Vallone of Xsight Labs closed the company’s Networking Field Day 41 session by tying the X-Series and E-Series together around programmability without a power penalty and an open software model. With Yoav Galon, he addressed smart-switch integration, the XISA instruction set, Xsight’s position on P4, community outreach, manufacturing capacity, and space qualification for Starlink.

Vallone argued that Xsight has eliminated the “programmability tax”: where programmable silicon once drew up to double the power of fixed-function parts, Xsight’s runs 30 to 40 percent lower. He added that without a fixed pipeline, packets need not traverse every stage or loop through twice. Smart switches pairing X-Series switching with E-Series DPUs offer a full Layer 1–7 stateful platform. When a delegate raised the problem of separate DPU and switch control planes, Galon said solution-level software integration falls to system partners. Vallone contrasted Xsight’s own OCP “beast,” an X2 chassis stuffed with E1 cards, with a partner’s cohesively designed platform. On openness, Xsight has published the XISA switch instruction set on its website without a login, supports community SONiC, and plans to upstream drivers to Linux and DPDK so vanilla OVS and SPDK run natively.

Galon said Xsight supports P4 but does not rely on it, calling it insufficiently expressive for stateful DPU, storage, and RDMA workloads. He also argued that complex P4 programs never run unchanged across architectures. Vallone noted that P4 would need extensions to address the X2’s 3,072 parallel cores, and said customers already program the switch directly in XISA, with AI tools generating code from the instruction set. He acknowledged industry-wide capacity constraints but said Xsight is securing the TSMC allocation its growing demand requires. He also confirmed that SpaceX used the X2 ASIC unmodified after radiation and vibration testing. His three takeaways were that the E1 data plane runs in software on Arm cores, that the E1L shares its architecture and binaries, and that the SDK is fully open, which he presented as why this attempt at programmable silicon will play out differently from its predecessors.