M POWERNP™ IBN POWERNPTM REFERENCES High-quality technical documentation for IBM's network processors, switch fabrics, queue manager, and interface conversion chips offered by IBM Microelectronics can be found at their web site at www.chips.ibm.com, where an elaborate technical library is available with detailed datasheets, pre- sentations, and application notes. 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. IBM POWERNP TM 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. Source: NETWORK PROCESSORS CHAPTER 5 INTEL IXA NETWORK PROCESSORS In this chapter, we will look at Intel's approach to network processing. At the time of this writing, Intel had announced three new network processing unit (NPU) chips as part of its second generation of network processors. These are all part of its evolving Internet Exchange Architecture (IXA) archi- tecture family. Compared to IBM's approach, which as we learned in the previous chapter is characterized by the ability to offer very high performance and to offer systems designers a complete one-stop shopping solution, Intel has taken a different route to tackle the network-processing challenge. It originally started with NPUs that performed modestly (namely, the IXP1200 family). These NPUs solidified the company's grip on the local area network (LAN) market, consisting of mostly customer premises equipment (CPE) and access equipment. So far, these have proven to be the most commercially suc- cessful network processors based on the number of market designs, according to Intel's claims in the trade press. Intel has capitalized on the ease of systems hardware and software design around its NPUs, especially given its outstanding software dev