In terms of equipment capabilities we most certainly have switches that have sets of layer 3 capabilities, even a ten year old cisco 3750x can do basic OSPF, BG

In terms of equipment capabilities we most certainly have switches that have sets of layer 3 capabilities, even a ten year old cisco 3750x can do basic OSPF, BGP, EIGRP etc. Often referred to as an enhanced or layer 3 switch. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-3560-x-series-switches/data_sheet_c78-584733.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/c... But you for sure wouldn't call it a router because it has nowhere near the routing table RAM, routing ability, or full set of routing configuration parameters as you would want to use on a dedicated purpose router. For your mikrotik, if you open it up or if you look at someone's teardown of one, what you'll see is a set of gigabit ethernet switch chips (perhaps 1 ASIC per every 4 ports) under heatsinks, that have purely layer 2 feature sets only. And then one CPU that runs the mikrotik routerOS which does layer 3 things. The mikrotik will have different levels of performance in packets per second capability for traffic flows that stay at purely layer 2, and another level of capability in Mbps and pps at layer 3. The OS on the mikrotik knows how to tell the switch chips how to do things at layer 2 (define this vlan, define this trunk, group certain ports into the same fabric, do 802.1x stuff, etc). for instance here's a block diagram of a mikrotik rb4011: https://i.mt.lv/cdn/product_files/RB4011iGSplusRM_180903.png https://i.mt.lv/cdn/product_files/RB4011iGSplusRM_180903.png