Architectural paradigms

In order to deal with high data-rates, several architectural paradigms are commonly used:

Pipeline of processors - each stage of the pipeline consisting of a processor performing one of the functions listed above. Parallel processing with multiple processors, often including multithreading. Specialized microcoded engines to more efficiently accomplish the tasks at hand. Recently, multicore architectures are used for higher layer (L4-L7), application processing.

Additionally, traffic management, which is a critical element in L2-L3 network processing and used to be executed by a variety of co-processors, has become an integral part of the network processor architecture, and a substantial part of its silicon area ("real estate") is devoted to the integrated traffic manager