t is unrelated to the topic of network processors. To give the reader a full dose of reality from both sides, we should mention the other side of the argument about the network processors. More specifically, we should clarify that to a certain extent network processors did not succeed immediately or live up to the expectations that they had raised in the industry. First, most network processor vendors needed to go through multiple generations of their designs just to get it right. To a large extent, this is an ongoing quest. NPU-chipset vendors have generally been characterized by a propensity toward responding impulsively in an affirmative fashion when cus- tomers, industry analysts, or even representatives from the trade press confront them with questions as to whether their chipset can accomplish specific tasks at wire speed. Customers, however, did not think about it and vendors conveniently never bothered to address what happens if other tasks must be performed at wire speed at the same time. Some of the major challenges confronting the industry include deciding the content of testing and agreeing upon how realistically performance-testing and benchmarking suites depict a traffic load, which can then be used as a satisfactory and truthful metric of anticipated or expected performance. The Network Processing Forum, an industry consortium, is actively working on these challenges; however, a lot of work still needs to be done before globally accepted and respected models and benchmarks are produced that emulate real-life network applica- tions in realistic quantities and mixes of different types of traffic. The combination of these types of traffic can be used to obtain consistent, realistic, and meaningful ratings of performance. The second challenge is that because many network processor chipsets turned out to be notori- ously complex to program and fine-tune to achieve balanced wire-speed performance, customers found out that they do not have an easy metric to judge and compare the actual software-engineerin