But he notes that companies like Cavium, Applied Micro Circuits, Texas Instruments, LSI and Fairchild have all talked publicly about using ARM processors in networking infrastructure.
According to Holzle, things that were hard to do on processors embedded in a networking box become much easier when they separately designed and merely communicated to the hardware using OpenFlow.
On Tuesday Intel agreed to acquire Fulcrum Microsystems, a privately-held designer of processors used in data center networking gear sold by companies such as Arista.