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Re: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

  • From: Marc Teichtahl
  • Date: Mon Apr 02 08:31:00 2001

adrian, 

to take your point one step further. 

the architecture of the router and the mechanism by which it forwards
packets differs for various vendors. to simply state "CPU" is a non-sense
when it comes to routers. You need to be more specific and look into the
scaling effects on scheduler performance, switching fabric performance and
architecture, Buffering, forwarding design ( centralised or distributed ),
and ASIC development. Remeber Moores law applies to ASICs and their
"widget" density. 

my 2c worths



-- 


---
Marc Teichtahl, B. Eng (Comp Sys) RMIT, IEEE 11016334
Network Sloven and Engineer

"I never remember what i did tomorrow"

PGP Key ID: 0x8E69E8A1

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> 
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2001, Travis Pugh wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Not to oversimplify, but assuming we can continue to separate forwarding
> > from the routing process itself, is this really a situation that calls for
> > a complete redesign of BGP?  If you look at the routing processors on
> > Cisco and Juniper hardware, Cisco's GSR is using a 200Mhz MIPS RISC
> > processor and Juniper is using a 333Mhz Mobile Pentium II.
> > 
> > With RISC reaching 1Ghz and Intel pushing 2Ghz, it appears that the actual
> > processors in use by the 2 big vendors are a couple of years behind.  What
> > happens to the boxes ability to process a 500,000 route table if you
> > quadruple it's memory and give it 5 times more processing power?
> > 
> > Also, it would likely require a re-write of software, but what's keeping
> > us from using SMP in routers?
> 
> Performance of a routing protocol is not a function of just
> the CPU avaliable.
> 
> Performance of a routing protocol is a function of the CPU
> avaliable and the network characteristics.
> 
> *shakes head* people keep forgetting this. Do you guys also
> think you can solve the internets problems by adding more bandwidth?
> 
> 
> 
> Adrian
> 
>