On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Roeland Meyer wrote:
Sorry, Leo is correct. Technologies he outlined are only the tip of the ice-berg of what *isn't* being exploited by the router vendors.
Your average PC doesn't have to be NEBS-compliant, doesn't have to work more than 24 hours w/o crashing, and doesn't have quite strict constraints on power & heat dissipation. It doesn't have to have redundant power, and its components are readily available and cheap (those are produced in _large_ batches). Using the "latest and greatest" in routers is not as easy as it seems. First of all, when you get a new CPU you typically get a pre-packaged set of peripherial chips (memory controllers, I/O bridges, etc) which are OK for building a PC but patently useless for building a router with its special needs for I/O performance. So then you have to build custom chips around the CPUs; and you just cannot get any useful advance information from CPU manufacturers because they do not want to undercut their business in peripheral chips (as will happen if their CPU interface specs leaked). You have to wait until the actual chip is released (or close to release). PC manufacturers do not worry abouth those things - they get ready-to-use reference motherboard designs, together with chip bundles; initial prices are high, and then companies in Taiwan start to reverse-engineer the stuff and drive prices lower. And don't get me started on heat and airflow issues :) Reason #1 why Pluris abandoned the original idea of using commodity CPUs was heat, not the switching speed. --vadim