 , multi-core network processors have become mainstream, with companies such as Freescale Semiconductor, Cavium Networks, Wintegra and Broadcom all manufacturing products with eight processors.For the system developer, a key challenge is how to exploit all the cores in these devices to achieve maximum networking performance at the system level, despite the performance limitations inherent in a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) operating system.Companies such as 6WIND provide portable packet processing software designed so that the networking data plane runs in a fast path environment outside the operating system of the network device.