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tredre3today at 12:24 AM1 replyview on HN

Although your benchmark is interesting, I don't think it's very relevant here. In my experience, you'll saturate the CPU through packet decoding, routing, and firewalling long before memory becomes a bottleneck.

That's why all network SoCs have hardware to accelerate such thing, otherwise in software alone they can barely handle simple routing at a few hundred mbps.

That chip doesn't seem to have that: https://cdn-resource.spacemit.com/file/chip/K1/K1_datasheet_...


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Veservtoday at 2:34 AM

1 Gb/s is only ~100,000 packets/s at standard MTU. You literally get 10 us/packet which is a eternity. Normal fast-path router operation only really needs to consider the header of <100 bytes/packet, so you are getting ~100 ns of compute per byte of considered data and on even a 1 Ghz processor you are getting over 100 instructions per byte of considered data. Failure to achieve a measly 1 Gb/s really says more about those software implementations than it says anything about the impossibility or difficulty of the problem.

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