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That's not because it's slower; that's because it's the low-end (non-programmable) member of its family. It was designed by a company called Fulcrum, which produced the FocalPoint FM2000/FM3000/FM4000 (1/10G) and FM5000/FM6000 (10G/40G) switching ASICs before being acquired by Intel. I think that a comparison to the FM4000, which is the programmable series of parts in the "Monaco" family, would be more fair. Here's their datasheet:
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... The FocalPoint ASICs were, as far as I know, some of the first to support (a demo-quality implementation of) OpenFlow in hardware. When Intel bought them, they released the datasheets, which is neat. As a real-world example, these ASICs were used in Arista's 7100 series (c. 2008) switches. They published a two-part "Technical Evaluation Guide" for those switches which are, among other things, an interesting glance at how switches are constructed out of ASICs. Part 1 (https://local.com.ua/forum/index.php?app=core&module=attach&...) shows the topology of each switch (starting on page 13). The 7124 is a single 24-port FM4224 with all 24 ports connected to front-panel ports. The 7148S has three FM4224 ASICs; each is connected to 16 front-panel ports and uses 4 ports (40 Gb/s) to connect to each of the other two ASICs in a ring. Intuitively, this means that it's possible that those inter-ASIC connections could cause bottlenecks (if e.g. all 16 ports connected to the first ASIC try to send 160 Gbit/s of traffic to the 16 connected to the second ASIC, they'll saturate the 40 Gbit/s of connectivity between the ASICs). Therefore, Arista also offered the 7148SX, which is non-blocking but needs six (!) FM4224s to make it happen! |