Switches have sophisticated hardware on both low and high ends, but many widely used entry level L3 switches are essentially nothing more than large amount of e

Switches have sophisticated hardware on both low and high ends, but many widely used entry level L3 switches are essentially nothing more than large amount of ethernet NICs connected to single CPU (sometimes with hardware acceleration which usually means specialized DMA engine). This is even more true for routers (some Cisco platforms even have various acceleration hardware that their software simply does not use).