The 7200 series router uses DRAM, SDRAM, and SRAM memory on the NPE in various combinations based on the model. The available memory is divided into three memory pools: the processor pool, the I/O pool, and the PCI pool (I/O-2 on NPE-300).
Below are some show memory command output examples. In our examples, we use a Cisco 7206 (NPE150) processor (revision B) with 43008K/6144K bytes of memory.
legacy_7206#show memory
Head Total(b) Used(b) Free(b) Lowest(b) Largest(b)
Processor 61A08FE0 16740384 10070412 6669972 6502744 6596068
I/O 2A00000 6291456 1482392 4809064 4517540 4809020
PCI 4B000000 1048576 648440 400136 400136 400092
cisco 7206VXR (NPE300) processor (revision B) with 122880K/40960K bytes of memory
7206VXR#show memory
Head Total(b) Used(b) Free(b) Lowest(b) Largest(b)
Processor 6192B280 99437952 27769836 71668116 70358432 70358428
I/O 20000000 33554440 4626776 28927664 28927664 28927612
I/O-2 7800000 8388616 2140184 6248432 6248432 6248380
Processor memory: This pool is used for storing the Cisco IOS software code, the routing tables, and the system buffers. It's allocated from the DRAM on the NPE-100, NPE-150, and the NPE-200; the SDRAM region on the NPE-175 and NPE-225; and SDRAM bank 0 on the NPE-300.
I/O memory: This pool is used for particle pools. Both the interface private pools and the public particle pool are allocated from this memory. The size of this memory depends on the type of NPE. NPE-100, NPE-150, and NPE-200 use different formulas to determine how much DRAM should be used for I/O memory, whereas the NPE-300 uses its SDRAM bank 1 which is fixed at 32 MB.
PCI memory: This small pool is mainly used for interface receive and transmit rings. It is sometimes used to allocate private interface particle pools for high-speed interfaces. On NPE-175, NPE-225, and NPE-300 systems, this pool is created in SDRAM. On the NPE-150 and NPE-200, it's created entirely on SRAM.
