Value of telephone numbers

[Dana Hudes]

Karl Denninger wrote:
> 
> The generic problem isn't address space -- its router manufacturers
> being
> coddled by the Internet industry rather than being forced to produce
> equipment
> that can handle the real load out there.  Why is it that I can buy a
> 100 MIPS
> system -- a GENERAL PURPOSE system -- for well under $1,000 on the
> secondary
> market (this pretty much establishes the price on the CPU, by the way)
> while
> that same class of processor isn't at the core of any existing major
> router
> doing BGP computations?
> 
> Why is it that nobody is producing a router where there is a
> *dedicated*
> CPU that does NOTHING OTHER than recompute BGP tables?  (I don't count
> prototypes, and yes, I am aware that there is *one* such device in
> that
> phase right now) Again, we're talking about something that isn't very
> expensive to do from a design perspective, and would obviate many of
> these discussions.
> 

First of all, this not a new trick. The IBM NSS's aka 6611-prime aka
Milford router did this --
the route engine was also for dealing with SNMP and other system
overhead so perhaps its not 
as pure as you like, but it didn't forward packets (the cards did). This
architecture is present to some extent in the commercial IBM 6611 .
It uses GateD to do its routing, the cards are "deep" cards with onboard
route tables.
Now, perhaps a Pentium Pro350 is more powerful than an old POWER2
RS/6000 but
nonetheless its available. The architecture that I understood of the
Ipsilon ISR
was that a Pentium-133 runs GateD and the forwarding engine is this ATM
switch.
Its been a year since I looked at it so my recall is fuzzy. 
wwww.ipsilon.com

I don't recall whether the Netstar Gigarouter cum Ascend GRF has smart
cards. I know it runs GateD.

Even if we have routers capable of running 150K routes, that costs money
and it doesn't matter that its cheaper now to have a Big Fat Router
than it was 8 years ago when the only thing around was the NSS at
around $150K to run the NSFNET full T3 backbone. Its a competitive
business enviornment out there and money spent on router memory is money
that could be spent paying engineers. Or stockholders.