Really? What are PCI bus transfer rates up to these days? I havent looked into it in quite a while.On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 08:49:04 -0400 Neil Horman <nhorman@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Quite simply a general purpose CPU system isn't normally built to handle network traffic at gigabit rates, especially not from multiple ports at once. If you really want a line rate gigabit router, you need custom ASIC to do hardware offload of that work. Several networking companies make just such hardware (of course most only sell the chips, not full pci cards with integrated NICS). Check out broadcom, AMCC or Intel, they all have hardware like what you're looking for.
Gigabit routing is possible with commodity hardware. It's a software problem for the cases that go fast enough currently.
N3il
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