> On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 05:52:43PM +0100, Lukas Tribus wrote: >> Its a software router (similar to ASR1k), > > That's the first time I've heard someone call the ASR1k a "software > router"... *raise eyebrow*
The ISR44xx series certainly is, with "multi-core data plane forwarding", an "emulated QFP" [...] delivering "ASIC-like performance" [1]. As for the ASR1k, QFP based forwarding just never felt that "hardware" to me. It only works through massive parallelization, packets are passed to a free PPE thread which "runs through a feature chain in software" [2]. Of course some/a lot of steps in the packet forwarding process are hardware assisted, but does this make QFP a real hardware based forwarding engine? I don't think so. Perhaps the software- vs hardware-forwarding distinction is just becoming obsolete with those platforms, as the technical reality is somewhere in between. Lukas [1] http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/4400-series-integrated-services-routers-isr/data_sheet_c78-728190.html [2] http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/asr-1000-series-aggregation-services-routers/solution_overview_c22-448936.html _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
