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