[ILUG-BOM] [Hardware] How much is too much?

[jtd]

On Tuesday 17 Mar 2009, Mukund Deshmukh wrote:
> > regular router boxes to make the ram run faster. We are not even
> > talking of cpu inspecting packets as yet.
> > The high end boxes do have multiple cpu and CAMs etc. But even
> > there my bet is that the performance would be very bursty.
>
> The switches and routers have dedicated chips for routing. The
> switch needs to examine only Ethernet address, but router needs to
> examine IP address and other info as well. They operate at wire
> speed (speed of electron flow) by using parallel processing and
> FPGA. 

FPGA are orders of magnitude slower than fabbed devices.
Therefore a fabbed cpu irrespective of arch will work faster than an 
fpga implementation. IF you take into account the need for cache 
memories on chip the fpga performs even worse.

> No CPU can work at wire speed while examining the packet. 

-- 
Rgds
JTD