Re: 10GE router resource

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

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 6:54 PM, Sargun Dhillon <sdhillon () decarta com> wrote:
>     I wonder how difficult it would be to integrate such a device on to
>  an x86 board cheaply. Something like NetFPGA (http://netfpga.org/) would
>  be an interesting place to start. The board has on board SRAM, a bit of
>  DRAM, an FPGA, and 2 GigE interfaces.

Hi Sargun,

SRAM != TCAM. With SRAM you can only access one word per cycle. The
coolness of the TCAM is that the entire memory is queried in one
cycle, spitting out the best match.

Nevertheless, there is some interesting hardware out there. The Endace
DAG card with the coprocessor has a TCAM on it, but it's not big
enough to handle a full BGP table.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com bill () herrin us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004