Re:Google nabs Apple as a cloud customer
by atm0sphere on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @10:27PM
(#11302217)
pretty sure (at least) AWS builds their own network hardware. I remember reading something a while back that said they found it magnitudes less expensive than buying enterprise hardware, with better performance as they went about the affair as scientifically as you'd expect them to.
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Re:Google nabs Apple as a cloud customer
by stephengillie on Thursday March 17, 2016 @02:22AM
(#11302852)
Old CoyotePoint routers were just a commodity x86 motherboard with an ancient SSD instead of spinning rust. Junipers use a duo of x86 (routing engine) and ASIC (packet forwarding engine). Cisco has supposedly moved from that architecture to an ARM and ASIC pairing.
The ASIC is just a hardware offload for known routes. Unknown routes, admin work, and Ping packets are handled by the x86/ARM CPU. It's not too different from offloading graphics work to the ASIC on your graphics card, or your mining to your Bitcoin ASIC.