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. IBM POWERNP IBN POWERNPTM IBM is an active member of the NPF. We discuss this organization in more detail in Appendix III, "Standardization Efforts in Network Processing." Among other things, the NPF has created an indus- try standard IPv4 forwarding benchmark. IBM's results, along with interfaces, configuration param- eters, and test setup, have been independently certified by The Tolly Group3 and released by the NPF.4 IBM has been reported to achieve greater than 10 Gbps of throughput by employing three PowerNP NP4GS3 network processors in the data path. THE NP4GX: IBM'S SECOND-GENERATION OC-48 NETWORK PROCESSOR At the Network Processors Conference West in October 2002, IBM Microelectronics announced the arrival of the NP4GX, its second-generation OC-48 processor. The impressive characteristic of the new NPU is that it enhances the performance of the NP4GS3 by offering almost an instant tripling computational "lung" capacity while preserving full compatibility with the NP4GS3 processor's soft- ware environment. The NP4GX is built using the IBM 0.13 Cu-metal complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technology, and it has been targeted to operate with a 500 MHz clock. The die con- tains 16 packet processors and several coprocessors like the NP4GS3, but the instruction memory has now been doubled to contain 64K instructions. Given the fact that its predecessor was more than capa- ble of handling sophisticated DiffServ types of applications, this should now enable more applica- tions that can utilize the significant computational headroom that the new processor offers. The PowerPC 405 core previously used in the NP4GS3 network processors has been replaced in the NP4GX by a PowerPC 440 core, which is a dual-issue superscalar RISC processor offering 1,000 MIPS capabilities that runs at 333 MHz or 500 MHz. In terms of interfaces, 