Multi-core Disappointment – Here We Go Again
It is time this industry learns from historic mistakes. If not, we may spend huge amounts in engineering efforts only to discover the path taken is a dead end. I read a recent article by Simon Stanley of Light Reading, and in it his research indicates that multi-core processors are being evaluated from applications in the network processing field. I don’t see this trend when talking to the major network equipment vendors, and this might be because they also remember what multi-core processors couldn’t deliver ten years ago.
Those who are seriously evaluating multi-core architectures for packet processing should be prepared for some surprises. Again. The same evolution happened several times before with separate processors brought together in a multi-processor architecture on the same die to scale processing performance. Have people already forgot about why previous multi-core proposals for packet processing did not fly?
First, multi-core architectures consume a lot of power. Second, they are not designed for deterministic wirespeed performance. Third, they are difficult to program efficiently – making it hard to meet the performance requirements in modern packet processing applications. And using ANSI-C does not help the inefficiency and performance challenges.
Multi-core processors are designed for general purposes, and they are therefore not optimized for packet processing. They lack the necessary service density. Xelerated’s Dataflow Architecture, in contrast, was designed to solve the challenge of combining programmability and super-efficient packet processing. It is a linearly scalable wirespeed-by-design processing architecture with low power and a great amount of service density.
Support for 40 or 100 G interfaces does not say anything about the device’s ability to perform a meaningful application at these speeds. And when looking into the requirements in advanced Carrier Ethernet, Fiber Access or Mobile Backhaul applications, general-purpose multi-core designs continue to fall short. To give you an idea: Xelerated’s new HX330 has over 900 percent greater service density compared to the most high-end multi-core processor on the market. That is, it has 9 times the processing capacity for network and packet processing!
It is time to learn from history. Multi-core architectures have a bright future in general applications, for the server and consumer markets. Here is where they belong – processing applications, not processing packets.
There is a reason why 20+ NPU vendors that spent multi-million dollars in multi-core architectures failed to deliver a commercial and technically viable option to the networking industry. This history is just ten years away. I’m confident network equipment vendors have a longer memory than this.
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