[rustyconover]

I get the feeling this is a bit like Bugatti building the Veyron, its super cool and impressive but the vast majority of us will never be able to or have a need to drive it.

It is still fun watch this switch go around the proverbial track, but I'm happy knowing that I'll never have to configure, build and test a switch of this complexity unless I really absolutely have to, with my largest caveat being AWS disappearing from the face of the earth.

[AceJohnny2]

You're not the target market. You shouldn't be making an analogy with a Veyron, which remains a luxury car for an individual. You should rather be comparing it with a firetruck, a vehicle custom-built for a purpose you as an individual you will never need.

I currently work in the network hardware industry (think Cisco, Juniper, etc). Our boxes sell in the 6-figure price range, each [1]. We sell to your ISP, wireless carrier, datacenter constructor. We're the competition this kind of box is aiming at.

[1] it's highly specific hardware and software for a low-volume market. Individual chips used in the hardware can cost multiple thousands of dollars each.

[es09]

Good points. I doubt if they are aiming at any competition. Their stated goal is to reduce the cost of the hardware for themselves by standardizing it. Their hope is that the other big guys (amazon, google etc) will pick this solution up driving up adoption and lowering the cost. If this happens, Cisco, Juniper et al gets disrupted and that's just a side effect.

[gonzo]

> Individual chips used in the hardware can cost multiple thousands of dollars each.

and 10 years ago, the compute power of a QC i7 would have tens of thousands of dollars.

[AceJohnny2]

Right, but we don't care about past chips. Moore's law applies to the whole market at the same time, so today's special network chips are still much better at what they do than today's general-purpose chips.

It's kind of stupid to say that today's general-purpose hardware can do what yesterday's special hardware could do at a faction of the cost, because the specialist market has also moved on and wants the performance of today's special hardware.

[charlesnw]

MRV?

[dsr_]

One of the great things about computing is that stuff which was insanely high-end N years ago is high-end of affordable now and will be commodity in another N years.

And N years after that you get that functionality for free along with your new TV.

[juliangoldsmith]

I'm not entirely sure what I'd do with 1.28 Tb/s of switching power.

Though, 30 years ago, in Neuromancer, William Gibson wrote about the city of Los Angeles transferring megabytes (yes, whole megabytes) of data each second, so he probably couldn't have imagined what someone would do with the gigabit switch on my desk.

[rustyconover]

If the people who brought me HDCP[1] are the same people that will give me a networking switch inside my television, maybe I will consider using this Facebook switch after all.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_...