"Line rate" is "fill the 100Mbit link with 100 million bits each second". Of course the overhead is included in that, since the overhead also goes over the wire
As the article calls it, the gold standard. If a device is capable of forwarding/switching packets at the smallest packet size line rate on all interfaces at the same time you don't have to think too much about its performance when designing your network. Haven't worked much with hardware for a few years but it was common that Cisco switches were not capable of this.
IMIX makes sense on devices that are not capable of small packet line rate like firewalls where bandwidth is much more costly and need to be sized appropriately.
> Both DUTs can achieve line rate performance on all ports with an NDR of 170 Bytes for the 88-LC0-36FH-M line card and 215 Bytes for 8201-32FH router. Same values were observed for both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. This exceeds all real-life deployments requirements regardless of position in the network.
The 9000 series analysis reports something like 400B packets to hit line rate.
Fundamentally, everyone has to scale their internal bus width and clock rate to hit the headline numbers, always at the cost of small frame performance.
What could go wrong?