what is inside those big networking products?

[buenos]

Hi

I am a hardware design engineer. I am specialized on X86 hardware design. When a company advertises a hw design engineer job, often they dont tell much specific about the technical details of the job. This means that in a new job i might have to swith a specialization area. For some fields where you did not invest 5+ years in mastering an area you can swap without loosing much, but I would not swap x86 to something else (I would loose too much). So for this reason I want to find out what types of products have x86 processors in them, so I can carefully select companies where it is worth applying for a job for me. Obviously desktop/laptop/server/SBC have x86 in them, but what about networking equipment? For an HR an X86 processor might seem to be the same as a large ASIC, but for me they are completely different worlds.

There are compnaies who make these networking equipment, big boxes with multiple SFP and similar 10Gbps interfaces on them. There are also storage arrays and FC switches with multiple 10Gbps ports on them. To be able to handle such a huge IO bandwidth, they must have some hard core high-performance processors or FPGAs. The product websites usually dont state what type of processor they have, or how much memory they have at what type.
What I would like to know is what is the core processing logic inside different networking products?

 

[jumbowat]

Hi,

Hey I am new to the embedded systems but I have not come across the x86 processors so far. The 64-bit processors are the popular MCUs today. Most of them have the same architecture and once you learn one, others should not be much of a problem. Change is inevitable, sooner or later x86 processors will exhaust in their current applications and will be replaced by something new and better. Its best to switch. With the experience that you have it should not be very difficult. Also in our part of the world, these changes take place faster. You can try your luck on the eastern part but there is no assurance as such. All the best.

 

[buenos]

"sooner or later x86 processors will exhaust in their current applications and will be replaced by something new and better"
-this sounds like speculation.
MCUs will not replace x86 everywhere, they are a different category. There were some applications with ETX, PC104 with X86 processors, they might get replaced with ARM for example. That makes sense, but the higher-end of processing powerstation is x86 or SPARC, MCUs and ARMs dont go near that. The problem with those ARM projects, is that they are so simple and boring. Designing ARM boards (I have done a few very recently) after X86 is like going back to primary school after getting my MSC. I want to avoid that.

 

[FvM]

"x86 hardware" spans a range between still used 16-bit real mode embedded chips and recent x86-64 processors from Intel and AMD. The common point is a certain software compatibility, but the hardware differences are larger than those between different processor families on a particular speed and performance level, I think. Thus I have difficulties to associate specific job skills with the term.

 

[buenos]

i worked with these x86 processors (all laptop/embedded processors, 1.2-2.5GHz, 10-25W, 64bit): Intel Core-2-duo, Core-i7, AMD Turion-II/Athlon-II Neo.
These are I think closer to the higher end of X86 (at least more powerful/complex than any ARM proc), and I expect to step forward soon to the Xeon/Opteron range.
So I need to find out what products have these in them.

 

[jumbowat]

Hi,

Thats my bad, I was thinking about microcontrollers all the while

Apologies my friend....