[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It's quite possible my viewpoint is outdated.