Thing is, there are people who report doing 10ge (almost) line rate 64 byte pps on current PC hardware, with the "right" combination of PCIe, decent chipsets and crazy tuned forwarding code complete with prefetching. Its just not being done in open source. I've seen a few 10ge PC routers recently, which can do 10ge at 1500 byte frames with out of the box Linux/FreeBSD. Its not that hard. What the PC/FOSS world is missing is a small group of people focused on high pps throughput code. There's...

Nor for 'just one' 10GigE port, and only on 'PC' hardware for grins. Serious system vendors (Cisco, Foundry, Juniper - many others) are able, for example, to set-up and tear-down multiple thousands of hardware-accelerated SSL connections *per second*, keep tens of thousands of simultaneous SSL sessions active at a time. Or other specific routing or switching tasks - few of them on the same specialized box. And carrier data centers have racks and racks of the various flavors of these. Th...