06-09-2020 12:01 PM
I've read from Cisco CCNA book that ASIC is slow when using CAM so they decided to use a specialized memory called TCAM to perform faster lookups...
but why?
how this TCAM can perform a faster lookup? is the TCAM a copy from MAC table?
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06-09-2020 12:06 PM
06-09-2020 12:06 PM
06-09-2020 04:10 PM
Thank you, the concepts are clearer now but those websites said that TCAMs are better for ACLs, QoS and Routing table (either for routers or layer 3 switches) and when the switch looks for a MAC address, the CAM is good for that job, but the CCNA book says that MACs are looked up in TCAM when ASIC is making forwarding decisions:
Second, the ASIC needs to perform table lookup in the MAC address table, so for fast table lookup, the switch uses a specialized type of memory to store the equivalent of the MAC address table: ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM). TCAM memory does not require the ASIC to execute loops through an algorithm to search the table. Instead, the ASIC can feed the fields to be matched, like a MAC address value, into the TCAM, and the TCAM returns the matching table entry, without a need to run a search algorithm
then, is the CAM useless?
06-10-2020 09:30 AM
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