RE: The ultimate TOE design

-----Original Message-----
From: jamal [mailto:hadi@cyberus.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 5:58 PM
To: Jeff Garzik
Cc: David S. Miller; alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk; paul@clubi.ie; 
netdev@oss.sgi.com; leonid.grossman@s2io.com; 
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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