[c-nsp] NPE-G1 PPS limitations

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Ross Vandegrift wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 11:35:13AM -0700, dpinkard at AccessLine.com wrote:
>> Would one expect gigE to gigE traffic local to the NPE-G1 to scale higher
>> than that?
>
> Yea, I would expect that.  I don't understand all of the
> architechtural issues on the 7200 series in great detail, but it seems
> that either the PCI bus that line cards use isn't really up to doing
> GigE, or the controllers on the PA-GE doesn't scale well.

The 7200 was never really intended to do lots of high-rate/wire-speed 
forwarding and the NPE-G1 and G2 were built to try to shoe-horn some of 
those capabilities into the box but unless you're going from NPE port to 
NPE port, you still have to live with the limitations of the split PCI 
bus that's part of the VXR architecture.  Where the 7200 series really 
excels is as a "swiss army knife" router because of its versatility and 
the wide range of interfaces available for it.

jms