Re: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

[Marc Teichtahl <marct () layerthree com>]

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