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

[Mark Tinka]

On 13/Jul/20 12:27, Łukasz Bromirski wrote:

> Do we have ASICs? Yes, they *still* usually drive fabrics, all else is essentially NPU - because it can be reprogrammed on the fly. As Saku pointed out, there’s less and less difference between modern x86 architectures and networking NPUs however and given how much different things can be easily done in software, this trend will continue to drive “cloud” applications. This should also help “simplifcation” trend, as there will be less and less dependency on the fancy “hardware” capabilities of a box.

I believe what is holding this back from becoming mainstream reality is
that the cloud providers are building their own swaths of software
solutions to run in x86 CPU's, and that code does not make it into the
wild to see what else can be done with it. So the general community
keeps messing about with flavour-of-the-year-SDN-thingy, until we
realize it doesn't work and we move on to yet-another concoction.

I believe if the cloud boys & girls shared more of that code so the
network operators can see what to do with it on white boxes fitted with
Broadcom (or equivalent), the rate of "simplification" could accelerate.


>
> Next wave will (are) probably photonics, moving further and further into direct feature capabilities without influencing speed-down to tackle specific feature in silicon. That will be true test to “how many features you *really* need” and great area to optimize further. Question is - how fast we’ll get there realistically with shipping products and how much it will level field vendors are playing on with Customers.

I saw a preso from a major cloud provider (their main cloud product
rhymes with the number of days in a year) around that back in San Diego,
2018, at some DWDM conference. It was scary for the Transport vendors.
That was nearly 3 years ago. It wouldn't surprise me if it's now an
in-house solution.

Mark.