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Is Hyperchip Hype?
Peter Galbraith writes "There was an interview on CBC (here in Canada) last evening about
Hyperchip, a Montreal-based
company that are working on a new type of router that would scale up 1000 times in traffic (so wouldn't be obsolete in less than a year) and would pass packets to their destination in a few hops instead of a dozen or more. Any experts out there think it's hype? Or real?"
The explanation on Hyperchip's "technology" page is pretty thin, but considering they just raised $70 million, I hope they've given more convincing details to their investors.
Step Two: Manufacture and market amazing new router.
That wasn't that hard now was it?
Simple hop count does translate directly into speed. A two hop route plagued with slow nodes might be (and often is) slower than a route that consists of more hops with faster nodes. Sounds like ignorant marketing hype.
Look at the graph on the company's white papers. Optical vs. Moore's law. First of all you really can't compare a law and optical. Second of all, they have moores law wrong.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It could be that they have 41 patents in Canada. The USPTO is not the only patent office in the world.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
It's not the bandwidth, it's the services. Besides, who can afford to provision 65,000 OC-192s?
Of course 65,000 OC-192's is an architectural scalability limit. It makes great marketing material.
The terabit router market reminds me of the supercomputer market in the late 1980's. There were a bunch of startups working with bleeding-edge technology to make the fastest machines for a handful of customers who could afford it. Many of the startups died as the actual machines came to market. There were only so many customers that could afford and would use such machines at that time.
One of the main things that differentiated the supercomputer survivors from the casualties was the ability to provide a total hardware, software, and support solution to the customers. For the terabit router market, look for the companies delivering the full solution to the customers. Like you said, it's the services. From what I know of Hyperchip, they started with a chip idea for a scalable fabric, and until recently they didn't have much software and services capability.
Also watch for the companies with the least hype. It seems that many of the terabit router companies that have died or are dying have been full of promises that they couldn't deliver. Caspian was one of those hyped companies, and they aren't doing well recently. The smart companies will keep quiet until they have something real, so the company that delivers the best terabit router might be one most people have not heard of.
The LightReading link that you gave is a good place to check out what people in the optical networking industry have to say. The noise level can be high on the message boards (not unlike Slashdot), but there are some individuals that have great insight into the terabit router market. One such inidividual goes by the message board name of "skeptic".
They just closed their fourth round of funding. Note this was 70 million Canadian dollars, US$43 million. Only US$12 million was from venture capitalists, the remaining US$31 million was essentially a loan from the government of Quebec.
These guys have made some pretty wild claims in the past. Their first product was (maybe still is) to be called the PBR 1280. PBR = PetaBitRouter. They claim it scales to ~65000 OC192 ports. That's pretty freaking huge.
We'll see. They claim they're relasing a product later this year.
But the never found any customers. It turns out that the few people that need very high speed routing don't buy anything but cisco and in that market it won't matter if you have a product thats much better, you'll have poor sales for years before the market will even consider your product.
As far as routing much faster, its not that hard to do. If you stop treating a router as a router and more like a switch, you can speed things up a grat deal with content addressable memory (the stuff used for cache tags). Its very expensive but 8 mb of CAM ram will let you decide which of 16 interfaces a packet goes to within 500 ps after the address bits hit the hardware. You can't do real time route update on this type of system like a cisco but you can still change routes within miliseconds.
The ideas behind the internet are dead when a small business can't dual home. Without routable class C address, that has already happened.