High-bandwidth packet switching on the raw general-purpose architecture

The switching of packets and other performance-critical tasks in modem Internet routers are done done using application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or custom-designed hardware, while existing general-purpose architectures have failed to give a useful interface to sufficient bandwidth to support high-bandwidth routing. By using an architecture that is more general-purpose routers can gain from economies of scale and increased flexibility compared to special-purpose hardware. We propose the use of the raw general-purpose processor as both a network processor and switch fabric for multigigabit routing. We show that the raw processor, through its tiled architecture and software-exposed onchip networking, has enough internal and external bandwidth to deal with multigigabit routing.