But if you're doing fast hardware routing, that's tens and tens of megabytes of TCAM, not DRAM. It's more akin to CPU cache in terms of latency, capacity and cost.
That's L3 cache though; they only have 0.5 MB of L2 cache per core.
I'm not really sure how much each of these types of memory cost, but I did find [1] which says "The cost of TCAM is also about 30 times more per bit of storage than SRAM". That suggests a CPU with something more like 0.5-1 GB of L3 cache would be a closer comparison.
