"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke

With the rapid adoption of the Internet for e-commerce and business processes, there is an increasing demand for intelligent services. Carriers and service providers want the ability to easily offer new kinds of services based on a variety of mechanisms such as traffic prioritization, virtual private networks, and load balancing. Such services are also required to be flexible enough to offer new features and functionality without requiring a major overhaul of the network infrastructure. OEMs or network equipment providers recognize the need for such flexibility. They are increasingly moving toward programmable platforms that extend the product lifetimes and allow faster introduction of new services. This trend is accompanied by the increasing use of merchant silicon to reap the benefits of the economies of scale.

We have introduced the Intel Internet Exchange Architecture (IXA) that provides both software and hardware building blocks for building programmable, reusable network platforms. The principal component of the Intel IXA architecture is the IXP network processor family. The IXP network processor is a fully programmable platform with a distributed data storage architecture consisting of multiple, hardware multithreaded processors. It has already been used in over 150 designs involving a variety of communication products ranging from broadband aggregation equipment (DSLAM, CMTS) to VPN routers. In addition, many leading universities in US, Europe, China, and India have adopted the IXPs both for their networking curricula and research.

The IXP architecture is a technological innovation that...