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

[Mark Tinka]

On 11/Jul/20 20:34, Saku Ytti wrote:

> 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.

Indeed.

NPU or TCAM, both provide hardware-based forwarding.

The difference comes down to flexibility vs. performance, and how far
you can push one in sacrifice for the other.

Mark.