I'm Linux there's a thing called route cache, which is really fast. Because in reality, even if you're a router at an IX you won't see traffic to all billions of ips.

So if an ip isn't in the cache it'll go through a slow path instead and get cached.

Why this wouldn't be possible in hardware is beyond me.

Routing on commodity hardware is becoming a thing too with DPDK and OVS, you can now do 200gbps on a single x86 box.