[ppml] too many variables

Fri Aug 10 18:08:26 UTC 2007

On 8/10/07, John Paul Morrison <jmorrison at bogomips.com> wrote:
>
>  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
>

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. We need to be substantially behind moores observation to
be economically viable. I have some small number of route processors in my
network and it is a major hassle to get even those few upgraded. In other
words, if you have a network that you can upgrade the RPs on every 18
months, let me know.

/vijay

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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