Re: Multiport Ethernet Cards(Plenty of em...)

[Ricky Beam]

On Fri, 14 Apr 2000, bert hubert wrote:
>> I'd be interested to know what you find. 
>> I do know that a Pentium can route almost 2 full T3s
>
>Some people spread the rumor that by its CISC nature, a pentium will never
>be a big router. Redbacks SMS-1000 however uses Pentiums and can route up to
>400 megabit, I'm told.

The Ascend GSR (gigarouter) has a P166-MMX at it's core.  Of course, it's
got alot of ASIC hardware assisting with routing.

The speed limitation is not the processor per se.  The PCI bus will be your
first bottleneck -- 33MHz/32bit == 132MB/s... 66MHz/64bit == 528MB/s.  For
"workgroup" hardware, that's plenty fast enough.  But it's just too slow
for high-end, "I wanna be MAE-Vegas" routing.

--Ricky