A Look Inside a Switch

What I'm about to tell you could be considered a little controversial. This is a computer. Well, actually this is a switch, and people don't really call this a computer. But technically, if you look at it, it takes in information, so there's input, it processes it, there's an output, and there's storage involved. And so it does compute. It is a computer of sorts. So let's take a look at what a switch is and what it does. We're going to take a look inside of it.

What a Switch Does

Switches are used to interconnect our networks. You can connect anything from desktops to laptops to access points, servers, firewalls, routers. We can interconnect all that so they can communicate. Now many of these switches will just have a few ports to it, or it can have a lot of ports on the front. This particular one has 48 ports, and we can connect 48 different pieces of equipment together so it can communicate. We're going to take the top off this thing to see why I say it really is technically a computer.

Inside the Switch

What I'll do is I'm just going to pop this top off right here, and I'm going to show you a few components of this. First of all, we see that there are some power supplies here, because just like everything else, it needs some power to operate. But these things are pretty beefy and big, because this is actually a PoE switch, so it will provide power over Ethernet for devices, to power devices like access points or phones.

It also has some fans right here, and I can pop these fans out. And these are both the power supplies, and these are hot swappable. As long as you don't take both power supplies out, you can swap these out while things are live, so you don't have to actually bring the equipment down to switch out some of this equipment.

Now we can see some integrated circuits on here, so there's chips on here that do processing. So we do have some processing that's happening on this board. In fact, some of them, it's so much so that it's generating heat and it needs heat sinks for it.

ASICs Versus a CPU

Now a computer has a central processing unit, a CPU, where a switch doesn't necessarily have that. A switch has something called ASIC. It's an application specific integrated circuit, and so it still is an integrated circuit, much like a CPU is. But rather than a CPU, where there's this central processing unit, instead we have multiple ASICs on this board, and it's specific to the application. It's designed for a specific application; in this case it's switching. So we have integrated circuits on here that are designed for switching.

Now this is a managed switch, and it can actually do a lot of fancy things. So in this particular case, this switch does have a CPU, a central processing unit. I believe this is it right here. I haven't found a good diagram of what all the circuitry is on this board, but I believe this is it. So it has the same components that a regular computer would have built into this, because we can manage a lot of different aspects of this switch. So this switch, although you wouldn't call it a computer, does do computing, both with the ASICs, with the application specific integrated circuits, and with the CPU, since this is a managed switch.

ASICs Beyond Switches

Switches are not alone in the use of ASICs. There are a lot of different equipment out there that use ASICs, but of course it's application specific, so whatever integrated circuit it's using is specifically designed for that and doesn't have a lot of wide application. As an example, ASICs designed for cryptocurrency and crypto mining are really designed for that and don't have a lot of uses beyond that.

Another thing that you'll see different between this switch and a regular desktop or a server is that you may occasionally open up a desktop or server and do some work inside of it, replace a piece of equipment or add something to it. But it's pretty rare for you to open up a switch like this. It's not something that really happens very often.