Architectural Paradigms
In order to deal with high data-rates, several architectural paradigms have been commonly used:
- Pipeline of processors - each stage of the pipeline consisting of an entire 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, multicored architectures are used for higher layers (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, becomes in integral part of the network processor architecture, and a substantial part of its silicon area ("real estate") is devoted to the integrated traffic manager
Read more about this topic: Network Processor
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“All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)