Alcatel-Lucent buries EDGE routers in x86 server fleet

Re: x86, not ARM64 ????

Do you know an ARM64 server that has 320Gbps network bandwidth available (you can add as many network cards as you like) ?

If you would have read the press release, then you have read that Alcatel-Lucent has been collaborating with Intel. That's exactly for the support that was needed to support this amount of bandwidth in a server. This kind of software doesn't run on your home PC.

Re: Virtualize hardware?

Years ago, many people would say that of OSes, now they're more or less all virtualized, because chips can't go faster anymore (since years) and actually can only be better by having more cores/functionnal units.

Same goes for network stuff: it is possible to have special cicuitry for network on current mass market CPUs (ARM or X386 or anything else). This will rapidly bring virtulized LAN systems on-par with ASICs based classical systems, therefore they will prevail.

Exactly the same happened for virtual OSes: their performance was sub-par without special virtualisation HW API that brought them, at the end, on-par.

Re: Virtualize hardware?

No, it's real. They run the regular TimOS software in a virtual machine, but they also need specialised network cards for all that bandwidth. It's those cards that do the work.