On Tue, 2 May 2017, [email protected] wrote:
Oh dear, 16.67Mpps budget per 10GE is now acceptable? We're doomed.
This has been in the making for a long time. There have been plenty of offerings where the line rate min-packet size kept creeping up and up. Cisco 12000 wasn't line-rate until engine2, then engine5 started slightly skimping on that, engine 2, 4 and 6 are the only wirespeed POS linecards that I know of.
Even the CRS-1 tapped out around 80 bytes wirespeed rate if I remember correctly, and there is/was an ASR9k 100G LC that only will do around 200-250 bytes minimum packet size (if I remember correctly, again).
So I'd say the market has spoken, people don't care about wirespeed anymore, hasn't for 10 years at least, and the market is catering for wirespeed forwarding at around 100-200 bytes min sized packets. If you want more than that, then you have to typically use fewer ports per NPU, if the internal wiring allows for that kind of "trickery" to get wirespeed out of the NPU by using less oversubscription of its capacity. Also, with fewer features the wirespeed performance might be a lot better than the worst-case specified by the vendor.
Going forward, it's not a bad thing to design your network to fit features commonly available in merchant silicon. People designing networks that require a "fully featured, classic-style core router" are going to discover that there is less and less focus on them, probably meaning significantly higher cost compared to the gear coming out that caters to the "less-complicated" networks.
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: [email protected] _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
