I'm really confused by "about $15k of x86 gear ... The minute AMD K10 and Intel Nehalem dropped, high routing performance was mostly a software problem". What kind of $15k machine would you have needed? That's a heck of a lot more than even the most expensive K10 2008 CPU (which according to Wikipedia seems to be Opteron 8384 (quad core, 2.7GHz, 1.0GHz HT, $2149 November 2008), supports up to 8 CPUs per machine, I guess that's what you mean.)