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This question may looks like little dump. sorry about it.

I saw Now day routers communicate few Gbps. but now day mcu's running speed lower than 4 GHz per second. Please explain How do they do this magic.

manna
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    you dont use microcontrollers for routers. the chips in routers are dedicated to that task, one chip with one or more processors, specialized logic, and dripping with network I/O. for example http://www.marvell.com/switching/ – old_timer Mar 31 '16 at 13:40
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    much of the magic is in the non-processor logic anyway, esp for a router, you could get away with an mcu inside because all it has to do is setup the tables, they might not even have a processor in the switch, it really isnt necessary (if they design in some means of configuring the switch on boot). Interestingly you will find 8051's used in a number of products like these as the thing that configures it on boot. – old_timer Mar 31 '16 at 13:41

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No magic at all :) They use specialized hardware which is only controlled by a (sometimes) small processor. So, they don't have to process every bit and byte but only tell the specialized hardware how to handle those bytes.

Take a look at a policeman standing in the middle of a crossing. He (the controller) just has to signal the drivers (specialized hardware) when and where to go. They handle the rest of it.

Also this hardware could use parallelization in data processing, meaning it could handle many bytes within one cycle, multiplying the throughput in comparison to the actual speed.

And: We have hybrid technology now where you have a cpu and specialized hardware modules on the same chip (like a microcontroller with rs232, spi and ethernet support). Same thing.

Hope this helps!

ibschreiber
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