4 ms·
ASICs require years to develop and aren’t flexible once deployed
by gonzopancho 1y ago
ASICs require years to develop and aren’t flexible once deployed
- nsteel 1y agoEven the ones supporting things like P4?
- eqvinox 1y agoYou don't develop an ASIC to run a router with, you buy one off the shelf. And the function of a router doesn't exactly change day by day (or even year by year).
- ZephyrP 1y agoChange keeps coming, even when the wire format of a protocol has ossified. I've spent years in security and router performance at Cisco, wrote a respectable fraction of the flagship's L3 and L2-L3 (tun) firewall. I merged a patch on this tried-and-true firewall just this year; it's now deployed. As vendors are eager to remind us, custom silicon to accelerate everything between L1 to L7 exists. That said, it is still the case in 2025 that the "fast path" data-plane will end up passing either nothing or everything in a flow to the "slow path" control-plane, where the most significant silicon is less 'ASIC' and more 'aarch64'. This is all to say that the GP's comments are broadly correct.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nsteel 1y agoMy colleagues are always writing new features for our edge and core router ASICs released more than 10 years ago. They ship new software versions multiple times a year. It is highly specialised work and the customer requesting the feature has to be big enough to make it worth-while, but our silicon is flexible enough to avoid off-loading to slow CPUs in many cases. You get what you pay for.