We will now take a closer look at some of the most advanced network processing unit (NPU) architectures that have been proposed by several vendors. Some of these vendors are solidly established and some are promising startups. Our coverage will not be exhaustive in detail for two reasons. First, this book does not take a cookbook approach. Second, the subject is massive and only so much can be packed in one single book. Detailed information can be found in each vendor s product datasheets and chipset documentation. We relied on these items as the main sources for compiling these overview chapters.

Our approach is to explain the fundamentals of each architecture by not only showing the breakthroughs, but also by highlighting the techniques, modules, analogies, and paradigms that we may have already reviewed in earlier chapters. We will look at how a complete network gear solution can be implemented for tackling design problems through the various NPU architectures and will pinpoint the strong and weak points of each approach.

In this chapter, we look at IBM s PowerNP family of network processors. More specifically, we...