By Cristian F. Dumitrescu
Minimizing/hiding the latency of complex or I/O intensive operations
Apart from common operations performed by any network processing intensive application (see Part 1), packet processing involves some specific operations that cannot be efficiently implemented with a general purpose instruction set.
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When using the pipeline model, each stage of the pipeline must still meet the packet budget, but the amount of processing that needs to fit into this number of clock cycles is limited to the one of the current pipeline stage as opposed to the full packet processing implemented by the entire system.

As a result of each pipeline stage processing a different packet, the packet budget is effectively multiplied with the number of pipeline stages.

When using the cluster model, the cluster is still required to process one packet per each packet budget interval, but by using internally several cores running in parallel, each one processing a different packet, the packet budget is effectively multiplied with the number of cores within the cluster.

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