And they make a Pentium 4 chip look like something you found in a Cracker Jack box. The mean time between failure is measured in decades, and predicted downtime per year is less than 5 minutes. Fans of IBM's Power microprocessor won't be disappointed, either. The microarchitecure of the Power4 is all about fast interprocessor communication and minimizing latency. The server market will be well served by this new generation.
Packets have to be routed, protocols have to be executed, all at blinding speeds.
This has given rise to a specialized kind of microprocessor that's heavily tailored to the task. The design points are far different than those for a general-purpose microprocessor, and they'd be rather foreign to most of us. These devices, however, are critically important to an increasingly networked world, and some predictions say that they'll outstrip the market for general-purpose processors. An embedded processor. An astounding number of designs were presented, and the presenters assured us that they were just the tip of the iceberg.