Traditional symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems scale poorly as the number of cores goes up. Bottlenecks due to shared memory contention and multi-core scheduling become increasingly prominent. The result is a leveling off in packet processing performance, where the addition of new cores leads only to marginal improvements in performance, or in some cases, even performance degradation.

Equipment providers who are looking to base their designs on traditional SMP for reasons of simplicity and convenience should understand the possible drawbacks before proceeding. Increases in performance when moving from a single-core to a dual or quad-core system do not necessarily translate into similar performance advances when moving from a quad-core system to systems with eight or more cores.

This paper looks at a couple of different multi-core networking software design options that scale better than traditional SMP, allowing equipment providers to future-proof their designs by having a single common architecture that can meet today’s performance requirements and scale for the future.

Business users evaluating WiMAX for their broadband and Internet-access needs may be surprised to find that the simple portability of the new services may be more useful, at least for right now, than the cellular-like capabilites that qualify WiMAX as a true next-generation wireless technology.