Why Networks Need ASICs EE Times

Tomorrow's networks are driving price and performance requirements that call for custom silicon, according to a senior manager for a company using ASICs. The volume of data, applications and transactions hitting data centers is increasing at an exponential pace. Add in predictions that by 2020 users will own as many as 25 connected devices and, according to Cisco, the Internet of Things will account for as many as 50 billion new IP-enabled devices and you can see a tsunami of traffic headed our way. Networking systems built around multi-purpose processors are about to slam into a price/performance wall that will either choke traffic or break networking budgets. Recently, Google engineers blogged about a new ASIC they developed, called a Tensor Processing Unit designed to accelerate machine-learning applications.