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If anything this shift to software based networking is a reflection the Intel's CPUs have reached the 'fast enough' mark.

Here are some of the relevant articles for those who may not be in the datacentre loop:

Regardless there is still place for time-critical network segments where you'll find the likes of QNX.

Yup. For most use cases, SDN is now good enough that you don't need premium/bespoke hardware solutions, commodity hardware works just as well.

And for the segment of the market where SDN isn't yet good enough (HFT, for instance), there are a lot of players in the field.

See this article that was on HN recently about one of Cisco's competitors, that seems to be making more performant switches than Cisco.