Hi Brian Firstly MPLS is not a good example, it is really not fundamentally different from IP and the same forwarder usually does both*. It can be implemented fully in S/W, or in H/W is the same way that IP can. Normally both are implemented in microcode with hardware acceleration. As you get further up the stack you discover other features that are supported in hardware, for example there are hardware accelerators in servers for the transport protocols. Then of course there are features like NTP that require hardware support for optimum performance. Firewalls are not my area but I imagine they now have a lot of hardware assistance. Then we need to take a look at the mobile world where a bit stream is sent from the tower to a datacenter SDR and other than the use of accelerators this could be an entirely software system from radio all the way up to the application. So I don’t think the above the H/W scoping is correct in 2023. The questions is whether it was in reality ever correct? Stewart * For good measure a lot of forwarders can do Ethernet bridge forwarding as well. |
