[ppml] too many variables

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:ppml-bounces at arin.net]On Behalf Of
vijay gill
> Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 11:08 AM
> To: John Paul Morrison
> Cc: ppml at arin.net; nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: [ppml] too many variables


> I guess people are still spectacularly missing the real point. The point
isn't that  the latest generation
> hardware cpu du jour you can pick up from the local hardware store is
doubling processing power every n months.
> The point is that getting them qualified, tested, verified, and then
deployed is a non trivial task.

This is nonsense.  The hardware cpu de jour that you pick up from the local
chop shop is 1-2 years
BEHIND what the high end fileserver vendors are using.  Companies like HP go
through a qualification,
testing and verification process for their high end gear that is no less
rigorous than what Cisco uses.

The big difference is that the PC vendors get the processors from Intel and
AMD when they are
in beta, and do their design and development while Intel and AMD are doing
their own
CPU design and development.  So when Intel is done and ready to release,
there is little work
for the PC vendors left to do to ship complete product.

The router vendors are approaching this like Ford and Chevy build car
computers.  They can get
old Pentium 3 700Mhz chips for a few bucks a processor so that is what they
are using.  They
can make an extra $90 in profit selling a $5000 router CPU card that has a
$10 processor in it than
a $5000 router CPU card that has a $100 processor in it.  And from a
marketing perspective if
the router uses some exotic RISC chip that nobody has ever heard of,
(because it's 15 year old
obsolete technology) that somewhat insulates them from unflattering
comparisons like what
people are making here.

This kind of attitude is symptomatic of the embedded systems industry.
Price the stuff out first
THEN develop for it.  This is why for example you don't have an Ethernet
jack in your automobile
that you can plug a laptop in and get a complete fault code analysis for a
vehicle failure
from an embedded webserver in the engine computer.  The embedded systems
people insist on
reinventing the wheel every time they design something and do their best to
ignore what
goes on in the PC world.

Go ahead and make your arguments about deployment, but it is the router
vendors who are foot
dragging here.

Ted