Network Processor Cards

[karman]

I bought one of the few that John listed here a couple years ago.

At first glance they look like networking cards on steroids. I mean, they have an ARM CPU, RAM...

They turned out to be engineering/dev samples of a common product (or at least it was common back then) called Network Processor Card.

Network Processor Cards where used to offload network from the main computer CPU. Back in the 2000 the computers CPUs where not able to handle big internet exchange traffic. We are speaking about 1Gb/10Gb speeds whereas mortals where using dialup connections. Computers CPU could congest by the high packet rate so Network Processor Cards where the solution.

They are PCI cards (can me plugged in a PC) and they are an autonomous ARM computer with a backplane PCI bridge to interconnect the networking interfaces to the cards ARM CPU. The cards ARM CPU then speaks to the computer CPU using the main motherboard PCI bus.

The IXP1200/2400 have also what Level One/Intel called uengine (micro engine) to handle specific networking task, being the ARM CPU the orchestator.

I found a really interesting presentation about this cards and the Intels IXP1200/2400 here:

https://slidetodoc.com/inf-5062-programming-asymmetric-multicore-processors-introduction-19/

Actually seems that these cards runs linux internally. The IXP1200 was a Level One design meanwhile the IXP2400 was an Intel design. That's the reason why IXP1200 has a StrongARM CPU whereas the IXP2400 has an intels XScale ARM.