Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

Mon Apr 2 11:55:34 UTC 2001

Not to oversimplify, but assuming we can continue to separate forwarding
from the routing process itself, is this really a situation that calls for
a complete redesign of BGP?  If you look at the routing processors on
Cisco and Juniper hardware, Cisco's GSR is using a 200Mhz MIPS RISC
processor and Juniper is using a 333Mhz Mobile Pentium II.

With RISC reaching 1Ghz and Intel pushing 2Ghz, it appears that the actual
processors in use by the 2 big vendors are a couple of years behind.  What
happens to the boxes ability to process a 500,000 route table if you
quadruple it's memory and give it 5 times more processing power?

Also, it would likely require a re-write of software, but what's keeping
us from using SMP in routers?

Cheers.

-travis

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

> 
> I have a feeling this one may start another very large NANOG thread:
> 
> http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0402routing.html
> 
> -Hank
> 
> 
> 