| 摘要 |
A protocol processor is a specialized processor dedicated to extracting data (i.e., a payload) from an incoming communication (e.g., packet) and configuring outgoing data for transmission, and includes one or more protocol processing elements (PPE). Each PPE may be programmed to handle any set of communication protocols, and includes a set of large registers (e.g., 128 bytes, 256 bytes). A PPE also includes a parse unit for parsing packets to retrieve certain information and a lookup unit for accessing a control block indicating how to process an incoming packet or outgoing payload. A modification unit removes headers from incoming packets and/or adds them to outgoing data. A timer unit manages a large number of timers (e.g., for different communication streams). A control block cache may store recently accessed control blocks, and a data streaming unit streams packets (or packet portions) into and out of the registers.
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