On Jul 13, 2010, at 11:11 AM, Greg Whynott wrote: >>> >> >> They are all software based, no matter who builds them. Cisco IOS, >> Juniper JunOS, etc. > > controlling hardware asic's and fpga's.
Which are in essence software burned into chips. They can provide some acceleration, but will the next faster set of multicore CPUs and related chipsets be faster? This back-and-forth has happened repeatedly over the decades. Even in NIC cards, where there were early cards that offloaded processing from the main computer, but on the next newer main CPU, these "accelerated" cards were now the bottleneck and processing moved back to the host. So it is with routers, ASICs and the like. You should buy a solution because it meets your needs. You should not care about the presence or absence of programmed logic vs. one or more CPUs. You should care about throughput capabilities, latency, packets per second, performance of filtering rules, etc. If the results can be obtained with off the shelf parts and at a fraction of the cost, why do you care whether it was built by someone with a big budget to spin ASICs, or by a company using software in fast, off-the-shelf hardware? Many Cisco products do not have ASICs or FPGAs, but are quite capable as routers. I expect that's true of all the vendors.
