As there isn't a lot of success stories of X86 plataforms and their connectivity, I'm going to share our experiencie, that's very successfully!

DELL R220 -
CPU : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 V2 @ 3.40GHz
Intel Ethernet i350 QuadPort 1GB
2xNetXtreme II BCM5716 Gigabit Ethernet (rev: 32)
2 GB DDR
RouterOS 6.12

(this valors were taken during an ICMP and UDP53 attack)
Peak ppks = 600k/s
Peak traffic = 2,6Gb/s ( forwarding)

2 BGP peers V4 moving 500k routes by each.
2 BGP peers V6 moving 25K total routes.
Total connectivity ( with outside providers ) up to 6G/s
Very approx data: 5K+ end customers

There was a drop in traffic but it was the fault of the server generating the graphics since it was out of control by mentioned attack

Is it just my idea or is 2,5 Gb/s of peak forwarding traffic a little low for such a machine? I mean, what would it take to forward 10Mb/s? Edgerouter PRO claims 8Mb/s with much less horsepower.

OK! I'm going to edit my post adding more information that I think it's important and I have not posted:
-2 BGP peers V4 moving 500k routes by each.
-2 BGP peers V6 moving 25K total routes by each
-Total potencially connectivity ( with outside providers ) up to 6G/s


And now, do you think the same?

What kind of load did you have at 20% CPU load? How does CPU load scale with forwarding load?

I add another image, I can't attach more than 3 files.

The multi-CPU graph at this moment.
Of course, one cpu catch 100% use, but is a 8 core server and the CPU supports VMDq and SRO-IV and the network card too., Each port have more than 1 CPU working for it ( Intel Ethernet i350 QuadPort 1GB has 8 queues for each port) .
The attack doesn't bring down de server

Now we are going to buy a dual processor, total 16 cores. I will share our experience.




PD: this graph has more zoom. It lasts 3 days. The other graph represents more days.