

Hardware associative array - MrBuddyCasino
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory

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MrBuddyCasino
I thought this is interesting in light of the recent routing table overload of
backbone routers, leading to slow internet connections around the world.

Apparently routers have a special memory called tcam, which is a hardware
implementation of an associative array. Routing table entries can be looked up
in a single operation, unlike traditional RAM.

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_username_
It's more complex than that. TCAMs are very expensive (silicon area wise -
they use 13 transistors per bit cell) and it's not possible to store entire
routing tables in them. Also more IPv6 addresses are present which consume 4x
more space than IPv4. All this leads to different scenarios i.e algorithmic
TCAMs.

