Switch Fabric

In Fabric mode 1, the switching fabric provides 45.76 Gbps aggregate bandwidth. In Fabric mode 2 (P580 only), the switching fabric provides 54.91 Gbps aggregate bandwidth.

The crossbar switch matrix provides low latency, high throughput packet switching using a crossbar architecture (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Crossbar Architecture

The crossbar supports:

• 13 fabric ports (two per I/O module slot, one for the supervisor module).
• 1.76 Gbps (in and out) on each fabric port in 50-series mode and 2.11 Gbps (in and out) on each fabric port in Fabric mode 2.
• 45.76 Gbps backplane capacity in Fabric mode 1 and 54.91 Gbps backplane capacity in Fabric mode 2.
• Under-subscribed switching fabric in most configurations.
• Single copy replication--Input frames destined for multiple output switch ports pass through the crossbar only once and are copied by the crossbar to each destination.
• Hardware-assisted multicast pruning--The switch only forwards to appropriate destination switch ports.