[insaneirish]

> It's not something a lot of users are aware of -- they often think they've bought an ASIC-based router! -- but essentially all of the big vendors entry and mid-level devices are software routers, and they're even trying to figure out how to sell their NOS experience on whitebox hardware without undercutting their branded hardware.

To be fair [to you], my original claim is a bit of a tautology as I don't really consider software/CPU based CPE gear to be 'real' networking.

I should be more specific. High radix switches/routers are, unequivocally, not built out of CPUs and software, period. To the point of the original discussion, these concentration points are the only place that byte order overhead would be significant. Others in this thread claim it's not significant even in CPU implementations due to optimized instructions, but I personally can't opine on that.