RE: The ultimate TOE design

[Leonid Grossman]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jamal [mailto:hadi@xxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 5:58 PM
> To: Jeff Garzik
> Cc: David S. Miller; alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; paul@xxxxxxxx; 
> netdev@xxxxxxxxxxx; leonid.grossman@xxxxxxxx; 
> linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: The ultimate TOE design
> 
> Jeff,
> You are only allowed to start a TOE thread only every six months ;->
> 
> On a serious note, I think that PCI-express (if it lives upto its
> expectation) will demolish dreams of a lot of these TOE investments.
> Our problem is NOT the CPU right now (80% idle processing 
> 450Kpps forwarding). Bus and memory distance/latency are. 

In servers, both bottlenecks are there - if you look at the cost of TCP and
filesystem processing at 10GbE, CPU is a huge problem (and will be for
foreseeable future), even for fastest 64-bit systems. 
I agree though that bus and memory are bigger issues, this is exactly the
reason for all these RDMA over Ethernet investments :-)
Anyways, did not mean to start an argument - with all the new CPU, bus and
HBA technologies coming to the market it will be another 18-24 months before
we know what works and what doesn't...
Leonid


>If 
> intel would get rid of the big conspiracy in the form of 
> chipset division and just integrate the MC like AMD is, we'll 
> be on our our way to kill TOE and a lot of the network 
> processors (like the IXP). Dang, running Linux is more 
> exciting than microcoding things to fit into a 2Kword program store. 
> 
> I rest my canadiana $.02 
> 
> cheers,
> jamal
> 

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