Next generation network processors: is there a trend towards nonspecific architectures?

The key characteristics of network processing are performance, ease-of-use, and flexibility. As technology continues to become increasingly more powerful, it becomes possible do networking functions using a nonspecific processor rather than developing a specific design tuned specifically for networking requirements. Also, as the industry continues to drive for increasing performance, we are now realizing that limitations on continual frequency-increases and therefore others ways to improve performance are now being considered. Such features as multiprocessing and multithreading are now making their ways into the architectures of the nonspecific processor to improve performance by reducing external latencies. With this trend in place, we are now at a time where many standard nonspecific architectures meet the capabilities needed for network-processor-based implementations. To highlight the many advantages of choosing to use these nonspecific new design architectures in the networking segment, we need to address the technical challenges associated with meeting the performance requirements of today's high performance network processors.