07:25:58 < FrFluffyBottom> it goes, "The 6500 has three major modes of operation. Classic, CEF and dCEF. In classic an ingress packet hits the bus. Because it's a bus all line cards and the supervisor see hte data. THe supervisor does a lookup and sends a message along teh results bus to the line cards, instructing those for who,m the packet was intended to forward and those for whom it was not to drop it. This is 16Gbps overall performance at 15mpps. Centralised forwarding is where a packet is converted to a 32byte compact header and sent along the classic bus to the supervisor which does a lookup and returns the result along the results bus. The line card then forwards at 40Gbps per slot at 30mpps. Finally,distributed forwarding, in this mode we have a full copy of the supervisor TCAM on the line card and do a local lookup. In this case, we get a full 48mpps per line card.