Re: 10GE router resource

["William Herrin" <herrin-nanog () dirtside com>]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 4:26 PM, Sargun Dhillon <sdhillon () decarta com> wrote:
>  from a viewpoint of hardware,
>  x86 is a fairly decent platform. I can stuff 40 (4x10GigE multiplex with
>  a switch) 1 GigE ports in it. Though, the way that Linux works, it
>  cannot handle high packet rates.

Correction: The way DRAM works, it cannot handle high packet rates.
Also note that the PCI-X bus tops out in the 7 to 8 gbps range and
it's half-duplex.

High-rate routers try to keep the packets in an SRAM queue and instead
of looking up destinations in a DRAM-based radix tree, they use a
special memory device called a TCAM.

http://www.pagiamtzis.com/cam/camintro.html

Regards.
Bill Herrin


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