born in three successive generations. Each one comes with 16 packet engines arranged in 4 parallel pipelines. It has been at the heart of several Cisco routers. A rough estimate of the computational power of a pair of PXF chips makes it approximately equivalent to an IBM NP4GS3. Another approach that companies like Cisco take toward the evolution of the market and the rap- idly advancing network-processing technology is the acquisition of a startup. Cisco recently acquired Navarro Networks, a secretive startup from Texas, which was led by industry-veteran management and was largely funded by Cisco. SUMMARY In this chapter, we discussed several promising architectures in the network-processor arena, coming predominantly but not exclusively from startup companies. We now have seen the trends toward inte- grating critical components inside the same die and the tendency to raise the performance bar toward higher wire speeds. A few players now offer unprecedented 40 Gbps processors and are probably a Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. OTHER NPU ARCHITECTURES OTHER NPU ARCHITECTURES little ahead of the demand curve in the market. Stepping back for a moment, the field seems over- populated in the 2.5 Gbps arena with multiple vendors competing for design wins and market share. As this is by far the largest chunk of the market and as some of the players are true powerhouses, sooner or later some players will have to bow out of the race. They will either fail or be acquired by a larger vendor. The jury is still out regarding the 10 Gbps market, which is definitely taking shape but in a very slow fashion. This is mainly due to the overall slow economy after the boom of the 1990s, something that is even further compounded by the significantly slower pace of investment from carriers who would like to upgrade their infrastructure but cannot a