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.