[c-nsp] Cisco N540-ACC-SYS ipv4 routes

[Saku Ytti]

On Sat, 11 Jul 2020 at 21:09, Radu-Adrian FEURDEAN
<cisco-nsp at radu-adrian.feurdean.net> wrote:

> Hi, wasn't ASR1k a "software-based" series, with route lookups NOT done from TCAM, fib limit being the RAM, and forwarding done by homegrown QFP?

I would say no, it was not software based, by HW. First gen QSFP or
Popey was 400MHz (1.2GHz if you count multithreading) 40 core, 307M
transistors, 20MB SRAM, 90nm lithography. It was tensilica platform
(like npower) but Cisco IP.
I think 2nd gen upped core count to  64 and frequency to 1.5GHz,
changed to 40nm lithography and transistor count to 1.8B. Unsure what
came after that.

But what is software based and what is hardware based? To me ASR1k is
HW based, it's an NPU box in my mind.  Not having TCAM does not
exclude box from being hardware, if not having TCAM means it's not
hardware, then also say Juniper MX, PTX are not hardware, Cisco 8k is
not hardware, Jericho2 isn't hardware, modern stuff tends to run off
of DRAM, not TCAM.

-- 
  ++ytti