Barefoot Networks

» see barefootnetworks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

You could not buy a Tofino chip the way you buy a graphics card. Barefoot Networks sold switch silicon into racks owned by Alibaba and Goldman Sachs, and the whole addressable market for the thing was maybe two dozen organizations on the planet. I have never held one. Almost nobody has.

The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2013 and sold its first shares that October, a seed round of $1,353,678 from four investors, with the paperwork signed on Christmas Eve by Martin Izzard as chief executive. The registered address on that filing is a house number on Wellesley Street in Palo Alto. Its founders were Nick McKeown, who had spent his career at Stanford arguing that networks should be programmable, along with Pat Bosshart and Izzard, both chip people out of Texas Instruments.

In December of that same year a paper went up on arXiv called "P4: Programming Protocol-Independent Packet Processors", published properly the following July in ACM's Computer Communication Review. Three of the eleven authors were Barefoot's own founders. The rest came out of Princeton and the big data-center operators. That is the unusual thing about this company: the language and the silicon came from the same people in the same months, and the paper was published before the chip existed.

Money arrived steadily and from everywhere. Lightspeed and Sequoia led a $24 million Series A in May 2014, and Dell and Andreessen Horowitz joined a $50 million round the following year. In 2016 Google and Goldman Sachs led a $57 million Series C, which Alibaba and Tencent extended by another $23 million that November. About $155 million in total.

Craig Barratt, who had previously run Google Fiber, came in as chief executive in February 2017, and the company spent the next two years shipping into a market of hyperscalers that could afford to write their own forwarding logic.

~ the record ~

~ the chip you could tell what to do ~

Here is what Tofino actually changed. A conventional switch chip arrives from its vendor knowing how to parse a fixed set of packet headers, and if you want it to understand a new one you wait for the next silicon, which takes years. Tofino was built on what Barefoot called a Protocol Independent Switch Architecture: the parsing and forwarding behavior was defined by the operator, in P4, after the chip was already in the rack. Izzard said at the unveiling that this was the beginning of the end for fixed-function switching, which was marketing, but it was not wrong about the technical claim.

The first part came out of stealth on 14 June 2016 at 6.5 Tb/s on a TSMC 16 nanometer process, with samples going out before 2016 was over. Tofino 2 followed in December 2018 at 7 nanometers and up to 12.8 Tb/s. The demonstration people actually remember is In-band Network Telemetry: AT&T and SnapRoute built a tool that showed the real path and latency of individual packets across a live link between Washington and San Francisco, and they built it in six weeks. On ordinary silicon that question has no answer at all.

~ bought, then switched off ~

Navin Shenoy announced Intel's acquisition on 10 June 2019 in a short corporate editorial. The price was never given, not that day and not afterward. Intel's own quarterly filing on 26 July 2019 confirms the deal closed in July in a single clause tucked beside the sale of its modem business, and the annual report for that year names Barefoot in a list without a number attached. The company Intel broke out separately in those accounts was Habana Labs, at $1.7 billion. Barefoot sat below the threshold at which Intel thought a figure was worth printing.

The ending came on 26 January 2023, on the Q4 2022 earnings call, in Pat Gelsinger's prepared remarks: Intel would end future investments in its network switching product line while continuing to support existing products and customers. He did not say Barefoot. He did not say Tofino. It was the seventh business he had exited since returning as chief executive, counted off in the same breath as a NAND sale and a round of layoffs, and when an analyst pushed he said only that things were under evaluation. The trade press supplied the names. Four days later Nick McKeown posted to the P4 announcement list to confirm that the next-generation Tofino was off the roadmap, which remains the only Intel-authored document that names the product it killed.

~ the language outlived the silicon ~

Tofino 3 had been shown publicly at 25.6 Tb/s and never shipped. The existing parts went to a slow retirement: most of the ordering codes now sit under "Retired and discontinued" on Intel's product pages, with one Tofino 2 part still listed as orderable. The old domain redirects, through a corporate 404 handler, to an Intel page that mentions Barefoot once, in the past tense, to explain where the products came from. The name survives in part numbers that begin with BFNT and in an API still called the Barefoot Runtime Interface.

P4 did better than the company. It went to the Open Networking Foundation in 2018 and the move completed in April 2019, so the language was never Intel's to cancel. On 15 January 2025 Intel open-sourced the Tofino compiler backend into the upstream P4 compiler and released the rest of the development environment, though the hardware support files stayed closed, which limits how much of it anyone can actually run.

The people landed strangely. McKeown ran Intel's Network and Edge Group from 2021 until 2023 and now describes himself as a professor emeritus at Stanford, which means the man who wrote the reassuring letter to the P4 community was the co-founder of the company whose chip was being discontinued. Craig Barratt left Intel in 2020, inside a year of the sale closing. He joined Intel's board in November 2025, and on 3 March 2026 that board elected him its independent chair, effective after the annual meeting that May. The founder-CEO of the business Intel bought and shut down now chairs the company that did it.

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