Accelerated data growth and the rise of demanding distributed workloads bring tough challenges to service providers, telcos, and enterprises. Intel Tofino IFPs aim to solve this challenge with intelligence, programmability, high performance, and real-time telemetry for visibility and manageability. P4-programmable packet processing enhances Ethernet switching for edge and cloud data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), and communications service providers.
Intel Tofino brings unique capabilities beyond any fixed-function Ethernet switch ASICs.
Without hard-backed forwarding logic in the silicon, protocols can be adjusted in software and compiled to the switch.
Intel Tofino also brings unmatched network visibility with its telemetry features, giving unprecedented access to monitor and track each packet in the pipeline.
Data-Plane Programmability allows coding middlebox functions in the P4 logic plane, enhancing regular switching and routing.
Intel Tofino 2 IFP expands this with an improved Traffic Manager. It can service advanced use cases such as congestion-aware routing.
It also offers more resources to generate packet lookup tables at a vast scale and export Ethernet switch metadata to other admin tools.
Breakthrough performance and solid resource allocation of Intel Tofino get a serious boost in the second generation Intel Tofino 2 IFP.
Feature |
Tofino |
Tofino 2 IFP |
---|---|---|
Max Throughput |
Up to 6.4Tbps |
Up to 12.8Tbps |
Match Action Pipelines |
Dual/Quad |
Quad |
TCAM pre pipe |
6.2 Mb |
10.3 Mb |
MAU Stages per Pipe |
12 |
Up to 20 |
Packet Buffer |
20/22MB |
64MB |
SerDes |
260 x 25Gbps SerDes, 10/25G NRZ |
256x 56Gbps, 10/25G NRZ, 50G PAM4 |
Ethernet Port Speed |
Optimized for 100GE/50GE/40GE/25GE |
Optimized for 400/200/100/50 GbE |
The Intel Tofino IFP family’s marvelous capabilities require proper software support to develop, debug, and optimize P4 applications.
Intel P4 Studio is a complete set, from a P4 compiler to a packet test framework, that enables your software development for Intel® Tofino™ Programmable Ethernet Switches.
Main features:
Intel®P4 Studio Components
The reference P4 data plane program, switch.p4, helps faster development of transformative networking solutions and data plane customization to get optimized results.
Its capabilities are quite potent:
It also supports the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) API for easy integration with open-source NOS, such as SONiC.
The Intel P4 Studio SDE includes a trial license of Intel P4 Insight. This powerful tool gives you unprecedented visibility into your P4 code for fast debugging and robust optimization.
Highlighted Features of Intel® P4 Insight
Intel® P4 Insight delivers a more streamlined and simplified path to debug and optimize software written in the open-source P4 network programming language. You can analyze the performance of your code in the tool’s interactive, web-based GUI.
Now it’s possible to dynamically search for specific tables, actions, and other components and quickly examine and modify their mapping to the Intel® Tofino™ resources. You can also easily compare versions of your P4 programs to see how your changes affected their performance.