On Jun 4, 2006, at 8:40 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:

> Does that mean CISCO and other gear makers make their own
> ASICs to power up those communication gears?
>
Yes.  Not exclusively, of course; most vendors have a range of
products that include everything from standard processors running
linux in near-"reference design" sort of configuration (ie LinkSys)
to boxes that are massive collections of state-of-the-art ASICs
even in places where you'd think they wouldn't need ASICs.  Some
products even contain vendor-supplied "network processors" in
various roles, so it's not like they're "useless."  But the vendor
dream of cisco (or other vendor) standardizing on their NPU and
using it in ALL their products to push up the volume to where that
single design win will pay for the product development is not very
realistic.  (If nothing else, there asre internal NIH problems,
and one BU picking a particular NPU is probably detrimental to the
next one to "evaluate" the landscape.  (sigh.))

It's like... If you want to hire and retain top hardware engineers,
you have to let them design ASICs.  :-)  Putting together standard
parts in standard ways is for ... contractors.

BillW

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