I have had the same gripes about the 5580 ASA platform. Its got all those cores, and all that ram, but its still a 32bit image running on 64bit hardware. The software is lagging behind the ability to truly use the hardware they are loading it on. Also, the ASR numbers look fairly accurate. I am using them to provide L2 MPLS ethernet pseudowires between datacenters across sonet infrastructure. Those things can take anything we have thrown at them in any role.
