[103367] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: 10GE router resource
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Herrin)
Wed Mar 26 17:10:32 2008
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:06:01 -0400
From: "William Herrin" <herrin-nanog@dirtside.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <47EAB16C.9010307@decarta.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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
--
William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
