How do network processors work?
With network bandwidth relentlessly outpacing silicon speed and with perpacket-processing going through the roof, what kind of processor architecture can address the challenge? A network processor architecture must extract a high level of performance per gate of silicon. In pursuit of this, it compromises on issues such as ease of programming. Consider how much silicon a modern GPP such as a Pentium or a PowerPC devotes not just to achieving speed, but to preserving ease of programming. The GPP takes a sequence of instructions, pipelines it, analyzes and dissects it, executes multiple instructions in parallel, manages multiple copies of registers, caches memory, and produces an illusion that the instructions were executed one after the other. Network processors eschew these complexities and use the saved silicon for other purposes. Multiprocessor architecture Although a wide variety of network processor architectures exist, they share some common themes. One theme is multiprocessing. A
