[tuetuopay]

I think you’re underestimating the CPUs in such telco devices. Even datacenter grade equipment (much easier on the control plane than telco or backbone) come with Xeon chips. Not the best ones, but still full blown server CPUs with heaps of RAM.

This is not Arm or risc-v territory (yet), perhaps Ampere devices. However this is approachable by Loongsoon an I’d bet it’s the path they’ll take.

[nsteel]

I've always understood it that datacentre equipment comes with beefier control plane processors then telco equipment. And that's for three main reasons. Firstly, the data planes themselves are less powerful and have to offload more to the CPU. Secondly, the thermal env of telco will cook a Xeon. Thirdly, SDN and extensible Linux-based software is more popular in datacente, compared to mostly proprietary telco software where the CPU has a fixed house-keeping role. Cavium's arm/mips processors were popular for telco control plane.

It's quite possible my viewpoint is outdated.