You can easily do origin validation on that type of CPU. It’s a very efficient lookup.

I guess we'll see what happens TBH. I didn't realize it'd been available in JunOS since 12.2 which covers a variety of devices (even some old stuff I've seen on customer sites), I've yet to come across a site with it deployed. Maybe I should do some consulting for folks.

Big isp core and edge routers absolutely use large Xeon CPUs.

If you count a single multicore 1.9Ghz CPU as a "Large Xeon" then you'd be right, otherwise thats incorrect.

8 cores in Cisco rsp880, released a few years ago so not that small back then.

Nothing stops you hooking up a regular PC to do route validation and run the BGP protocol and stuff, and load validated routes into any router you choose.

There are lots of things stopping that...

The first namely being that nobody is going to do that unless they have too much time on their hands and don't actually run a real network. "Just loading routes" into a router is not really that straightforward.

A lot of people, including very large companies are doing this in production. Using a route reflector/route server isn’t new, and it is very common.

Doing it right is not easy, and most people don't do it correctly nor do they know how to make it work all the time.

Isn't that the entire idea behind the "software defined networking" craze?

There's certainly an aspect to that, but generally no.

> mine uses PPC, which hasn't been in a desktop in quite some time

Raptor sells desktops with IBM POWER9 CPUs – https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html – they are expensive, and the same amount of money would buy you a much more powerful x86 system, but they exist.