[ppml] too many variables

[John Paul Morrison]

And yet people still say the sky is falling with respect to routing 
convergence and FIB size.  Probably a better comparison BTW, would be 
with a Nintendo or Playstation, as they are MIPS and PowerPC based. Even 
the latest route processor for a decent peering box is only a 1.2 GHz 
PowerPC with 2 GB RAM (RSP720) - so basically an old iBook is enough for 
the BGP control plane load these days? I think this has something to do 
with the vendors giving you just enough to keep you going, but not so 
much that you delay hardware upgrades :-)

There have been big gains in silicon for the fast switched path, but the 
route processors even on high end routers are still pretty low end in 
comparison to what's common on the average desktop.
I would say that when control plane/processor power becomes critical, I 
would hope to see better processors inside.

With the IETF saying that speed and forwarding path are the bottlenecks 
now, not FIB size, perhaps there just isn't enough load to push Core Duo 
processors in your routers. (If Apple can switch, why not Cisco?) 
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07mar/slides/plenaryw-3.pdf


John Paul Morrison, CCIE 8191

A better comparison would be with a Playstation or Nintendo,

Leo Bicknell wrote:
> In a message written on Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 04:21:37PM +0000, bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
>   
>> (1) there are technology factors we can't predict, e.g.,
>>         moore's law effects on hardware development
>>     
>
> Some of that is predictable though.  I'm sitting here looking at a
> heavily peered exchange point router with a rather large FIB.  It
> has in it a Pentium III 700Mhz processor.  Per Wikipedia
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III) it appears they were
> released in late 1999 to early 2000.  This box is solidly two,
> perhaps three, and maybe even 4 doublings behind things that are
> already available at your local best buy off the shelf.
>
> Heck, this chip is slower than the original Xbox chip, a $400
> obsolete game console.
>
>   
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