It would not surprise me at all if the sequencing step was done via FPGA processing many network inputs at line rate with a shared monotonic clock. This would give it some amount of parallelism.
good point, sequencing is very minimal, therefore some parallelism is feasible that way, but the pipeline is not that deep, at least ideally. Of course if people are chasing nano-seconds, it may make sense.
cgio|2 months ago