3 ms·

So how many backbone routers are 20 years old? Your claim was that any change to the ASIC was the same design cost. But really? A 40-bit routing table design,

• XorNot 3y ago
  How much cost in labor, disruption and time do you think upgrading every backbone router would be? When would you have done it? When the hardware was 5 years old? 10 years old? I've been on change operations where the hardware was over a decade old and our biggest concern was making sure we had replacement PSUs on hand since the thermal shock of a reboot might take them out. This is the problem, you have absolutely no idea what anything costs or how it works - you're simply thinking "lifting those bits sounds heavy, what if we made them lighter?" as though a committee of engineers, designers and industry didn't spend a lot of time considering exactly that problem. If you could add 1 byte in software and be done with it, it would have already happened.
  • amoss 3y ago
    Upgrading hardware is an ongoing process. You are proposing a single point of change without any reason for it to be handled that way. You are arguing that all change has the same cost. I don't see your reasoning for this. A smaller change to a system has a lower cost in R&D, and a lower cost in manufacture. Although it is probably true that the cost of updating all equipment dominates the cost of redesign, this is only an issue for a big bang update rather than a rolling upgrade.
• ikiris 3y ago
  This shows a basic lack of understanding as to how any of this works.