The project, in a presentation by Frank Frankovsy at Interop, said it was taking a slightly different tack with its design, deciding to get input from others before actually making and releasing the hardware to the community. However, just because the hardware isn’t designed yet, Facebook isn’t going to twiddle its thumbs for a traditional multi-year design cycle. Frankovsky told me in an interview that he expects the hardware to b out in 9 to 12 months.

“We have built these islands of openness in the data center but the last element, and the one that was connecting the compute and storage, was the network,” said Frankovsky. “And there is a lot of pent-up passion out there for breaking open this appliance model.”

Networking is the last bastion of proprietary profits

Prepare to be disaggregated, switch!

For those who don’t dwell in data centers, the top-of-rack switch is the networking gear that sits on the top of a rack of servers directing traffic between those boxes and between the other racks in the data center. While the networking world is all aflutter over the promise of OpenFlow and software-defined networking, very little real progress has been made in building switches for the webscale data center.

Google, a few years back, had famously issued a request for a new type of switch that would fit its very specific scaled-out needs and no one responded. Now the search giant makes its own hardware. But soon after that, Andy Bechtolsheim saw the need for Google-like speeds and scale and started Arista, a switch company that has dominated in the webscale, financial and high-performance switching space. Meanwhile, at the lower end, Cisco’s cheaper Nexus line of switches have done really well.

Facebook’s Najam Ahmad.

Yet, these options aren’t palatable for Frankovsky or Najam Ahmad of Facebook (Ahmad will be at our Structure conference in June discussing more about Facebook’s networking strategy). On the existing product side, Frankovsky is frustrated by hardware that doesn’t play nicely at scale. He specifically mentioned that the side venting of heat on switches means he can’t place them right next to another switch. Ahmad, who is in charge of the social-networking giant’s network, is concerned about getting out of the proprietary OS model.

“We want it to be OS-agnostic so we can use one from our existing provider or build our own,” he said. He added that he’d prefer an open Linux-based implementation. These proprietary OSes — Cisco has IOS, Juniper has Junos and Arista has EOS — are one of the reasons that companies are locked into one networking gear provider. They are also stuck using proprietary code to make changes.

Who will be the Red Hat of the networking OS?

Networking cables along the ceiling at Facebook HQ.

If you are chock full of technically savvy people, losing the agility that comes from writing your own code as well as paying higher prices for the proprietary hardware and software combination is probably maddening. Hence Facebook’s interest in the open source OS. Of course, building out the underlying hardware is only the first step, the next will be supporting an OS that runs on top of that system.

While Facebook might build its own OS, not every company will want to do that, and Facebook may not open source its own networking OS if it ever makes one. That leaves a market opportunity. Perhaps a firm like Arista might move in here with an open source version of EOS, although given that Arista uses merchant silicon in its boxes, putting up an open-source version of its software would eat into its margins.

This is neither Open Flow nor SDN

But let’s go back to the box. Facebook is working with Broadcom, Intel, The Open Daylight Foundation, the Open Networking Foundation and Big Switch as some of its collaborators on this project. The box itself might run x86 hardware or a proprietary ASIC, according to Frankovsky. As for the protocols, Open Compute is going to see what the other collaborators want.

Software-defined networking

But for those wondering about Open Flow support, it’s likely. Frankovsky said that the Open Networking Foundation asked Facebook to get involved via the Open Compute Project with making open networking hardware. While Frankovsky and Ahmad didn’t cop to it, I know there has been frustration in many areas of the webscale and networking world that the promise of commodity hardware that Open Flow could offer has not really hit the market in a way that offers the most flexibility for data center operators.

Frankovsky said that the ONF approached Open Compute (Facebook is a founding member of both organizations) in part because it believed it could move quickly on this. And it will. But it’s worth noting that this announcement is about an open source top-of-rack switch, not a controller and not some type of software-defined networking play.

Other companies may take this box and perhaps an open source OS if one is developed, and then layer on some type of controller software to make a software-defined network, but this is just a box.

That being said, this is a box that could seriously disrupt the existing players in networking, from giants like Cisco and Dell all the way to smaller startups like NoviFlow or even Pica8. Much like Facebook is changing the server market with Open Compute, we’ll see if it can tweak the model and do the same in networking.

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The details on the new BeagleBone board are here, but basically TI is offering a 1 GHz ARM processor plus the connectivity and power components on a single board for $45. That’s a lot of compute power for a little price. While the Raspberry Pi costs $35 it doesn’t have as many ports built in, and Adrian Valenzuel, marketing director of TI’s Sitara ARM processor product line, said it also isn’t as open.

When pressed, he said that people who build with the Pi can’t buy the hardware that comprises the Pi board on the open market, unlike with the TI board. He’s right. The chip on the Pi is built by Broadcom, but it’s not something that anyone can simply order and play with. On the flip side, Atmel, the company that makes the processors on the Arduino boards, sells those components and has released software supporting the Arduino community.

And while some people might be content to play with $35 Pis, there are plenty of people thinking about pro-quality projects that might want to get even more granular than the board, and try their hand at tweaking the components around the processor. That’s TI’s sales pitch as it moves down market to the class of makers who love the power of the Pi over the ubiquitous (in Maker circles, anyway) Arduino.

TI’s hope is that by getting people playing with its board it can sell components and attract a user base that wants to play with its hardware. It may never be a huge business, but it’s one that chip makers are paying attention to. Earlier this year AMD introduced its GizmoSphere board, a $200 board and developer community for makers.

While none of the companies involved are willing to share any sense of how these products may help them financially, it’s clear that chip firms are eying the maker community as a market worth paying attention to, especially as the internet of things heats up.

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Intel is showcasing its networking silicon, but it’s also offering two reference designs — one for new switches and one for new servers that would use Intel’s new chips. It’s also showing of a software layer called the Intel Data Plane Development Kit for OpenVSwitch that will accelerate packet processing on Intel’s CPUs instead of on dedicated network processors. One of the reference designs is aimed at the data center and the top of rack switches made by Cisco, Juniper, Arista and Force10 (owned by Dell), and the other is more of a punch for Cisco and Juniper in that it’s aimed at service providers. In fact, at the event Intel said Verizon was testing a prototype version of its reference design.

With these offerings, Intel is putting Broadcom, a popular maker of merchant silicon, on notice that it’s going directly after its business. That’s not surprising. The only question is how low Intel will go in pricing to put the hurt on Broadcom. But it’s also providing designs and capabilities that could obviate the need for special-purpose silicon that Cisco and Juniper currently rely on in their high-end boxes. Intel has gone after special purpose hardware before when it took on Sun and IBM in the server world with its x86 chips for personal computers.

Intel’s moves into the networking world are a symptom of the broader shift in computing. On the consumer side, mobility is changing the devices we use. In the enterprise, considerations of power consumption can now trump performance. In fact, super chips like the ones Intel traditionally sells can cause their own challenges in a virtualized world because using all of that capacity requires data center operators to virtualize the hardware and complicate their lives.

On the enterprise side the architecture to support our computing needs is changing as well as the workloads. The business considerations are changing too. This is a trend that’s shifting the ground underfoot all of the large IT vendors. So to see Intel going after its fellow chipmakers is perhaps unsurprising, but to see it going after Cisco’s and Juniper’s markets is like watching a rat resort to cannibalism during a time of starvation.

IT companies aren’t starving yet, but they are under stress, as Intel’s lackluster earnings indicate. The very real disruptions caused by a new generation of computing and web infrastructure are going to eat away at the margins and business models supporting today’s giants. Seen in this context, Intel’s moves aren’t surprising, but they are a symptom of the overall disruption in the IT world.

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Broadcom first hinted at a cooperation with Roku at CES, and it highlighted the partnership at Mobile World Congress this week. Roku has been using Broadcom chips for some time, and in the past IT closely collaborated with the chip maker on the launch of its second-generation hardware, so it makes a lot of sense for Roku to add support for Broadcom’s Miracast as well.

Check out the video below for a demo of Miracast:

There is no official word yet on which devices are going to support Miracast. However, Roku’s recently introduced Streaming Stick already supports Wi-Fi Direct, the wireless networking standard at the core of Miracast’s technology that allows devices to directly communicate with each other.

I noticed that this would enable wireless video streaming when Roku first demoed the stick back in September, and Roku Director of Product Management Lloyd Klarke confirmed at the time that the company was working on bringing video mirroring to its devices. One can assume that Miracast will be added to the Streaming Stick through a firmware update, perhaps when Roku is rolling out version 5.0 of its software.

It’s unlikely that Miracast will work with Roku’s existing streaming boxes, but the company seems to be working on a hardware refresh already: Engadget spotted an FCC filing for a still-unanounced Roku 4200X player earlier this month, which likely supports Wi-Fi Direct as well.

Roku didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this article. A Broadcom spokesperson confirmed that the hardware used for Roku’s Streaming Stick is Miracast-capable, but declined to comment on Roku’s plans for the technology.

AirPlay-like wireless video streaming has emerged as a key strategy for connected device makers in recent months. In January, Netflix and YouTube launched a joint effort for an open second-screen protocol called DIAL, and just a few days ago, Samsung unveiled its very own media streaming device to mirror content from Samsung mobile devices on legacy TV sets.

Broadcom’s Miracast has added a number of partners in recent months, including Intel a nd Google, which integrated the technology into Android 4.2. However, hardware support for Miracast video mirroring is still somewhat spotty. For example, Miracast is supported by the Nexus 4, but not by the Nexus 7 or 10.

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The Tegra 4 handset is anticipated in the first half of 2013 according to Nvidia, and follows ZTE’s use of Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and 3 processors and Icera modem in earlier phones. It’s also the beginning of handsets designed to wow users with full HD playback and other features that require some serious processing power.

Nvidia isn’t the only company pushing more powerful application processors and flexible modems; ST-Ericsson announced a 3GHz monstrosity today as part of its NovaThor line of integrated chips. While ST-Ericsson is only showing off a prototype, the specs clearly show that it too has visions of faster phones that require a lot of processing power.

The NovaThor also supports a huge variety of mobile radio technologies that make it useful in many geographic areas. For those who want to get technical, the NovaThor L8580 supports downlink speeds up to 150Mbps as well as LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD, HSPA+, GSM and TD-SCDMA. It has up to 17 bands in the same device and a single radio for carrier aggregation, which is what enables it to tune into frequencies in many markets. Like Broadcom’s latest modem, ST-Ericsson and Nvidia are pushing the bar when it comes to building radios that can travel far and wide even if a country uses different frequencies for their LTE deployments.

In many ways the future of phones is the same has it had been, more performance in more places. Technology is awesome.

The story was corrected on Feb. 21 to reflect the fact that ZTE is launching two phones one with the Tegra 4 and one later, using the i500 modem.

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The chip with the endearing name of BCM21892 is sampling now to hardware partners and expected to be in production by next year. So don’t look for any smartphones or tablets this year that use it. That’s OK because LTE-Advanced networks are still a future event as well. But once they’re here, good ol’ BCM21892 can take advantage of them with downloads up to 150 Mbps with uploads topping out at 50 Mbps.

Technically the radio interface on Broadcom’s new chip still falls in the plain old LTE category. Only when Broadcom boosts speeds to 300 Mbps over 20 MHz of spectrum will it really be LTE-Advanced as defined by the standards bodies. That said, these chips will support carrier aggregation, which is an LTE-Advanced technique.

Broadcom is also positioning the small chip as a solution for all mobile broadband needs with support for all of the 3GPP standards including LTE FDD and TDD, LTE-Advanced with carrier aggregation, HSPA+, TD-SCDMA and EDGE/GSM.

The chip is also optimized for Voice over LTE (VoLTE). Broadcom says that these voice calls use 40 percent less battery than calls over traditional cellular networks. That’s important because tests of prior VoLTE implementations have shown the calls to use more battery than traditional calls.

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The chips which currently cost about $10, takes advantage of the 60GHz spectrum which has high data rates, but can’t go very far. That spectrum also doesn’t pass through walls, people or objects, which means that Silicon Image has had to develop new adaptive beam-forming technologies to make sure players who are using their phones to project a mobile game on their TV screens can play without inadvertently interrupting the signal.

For the last five years, the effort to commercialize this band of unlicensed spectrum has been hotly contested by different chip companies and standard. Silicon Image bought a company called SiBeam in 2011 to score WirelessHD, long after I thought the other standards were doomed when Intel and Broadcom created the WiGig alliance in 2009 to push a different standard. But the executives at Silicon Image insist the two technologies can co-exist in the spectrum band, and that WiGig is more of an effort to push Wi-Fi into higher data rates — you can achieve multigigabit speeds with WiGig and WirelessHD radios.

So Silicon Image is hoping the gamers, concerned about latency, will demand WirelessHD radios inside their mobile handset and help bring the technology to the mass market. Already, one can buy the radios to plug into televisions or other screens for $30 or $40 and computer makers already put WirelessHD into their high-end gaming machines. The latest Silicon Image chip is finally small enough and efficient enough to fit inside the crowded handset form factor. Mobile games should be able to buy devices with WirelessHD by the second half of 2013.

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