switch speed question

[thegameiam at yahoo.com (David Barak)]

Doesn't that assume that the communicarion is unidirectional?

If two hosts are exchanging 1Gbps flows, the traffic across the bus will be 2Gbps, right?

And of course, this doesn't include any bus-intensive operations like multicast
or things which require cpu processing - those can consume a lot more resources than the input rate of the port.

-David Barak

Tom Storey wrote: 
>> Not every bit in results in just one bit out.  Broadcast, multicast,
>> flooding for unknown MACs (or switching failures), ...
> They were talking about a simple scenario where a bit that enters a port
> will leave a port. With 24 gigabit ports, for all intents and purposes,
> you will only ever have 24 gigabits at the most traversing the backplane.