On: Going With The Flow: Google’s Secret Switch To The...

[anusinha]

It seems as though ASICs are the method of choice for every high performance system. The examples that come to mind are supercomputer interconnects and the completely engineered from scratch Anton[1] machines that DE Shaw Research uses for very specific computational chemistry applications.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_%28computer%29

[Symmetry → anusinha]

Yes, going from a general purpose CPU to an ASIC will generally improve performance per watt by two or three orders of magnitude.

[spydum → anusinha]

the packet switching still occurs in ASIC, it's the routing forwarding table population which can be done in software