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Exact details on Cisco switch and/or router architecture can be hard to come by, as much of the information, Cisco appears to consider proprietary.
Most switches have some kind of cross bar architecture. Overall bandwidth tends to be higher in later variants (to support higher port densities and/or higher bandwidth ports). Later switch architectures are less likely to block at ports. However, there are often other architecture changes which may improve or worsen performance. For example, 2960 tends to have more fabric bandwidth than the 2950, but the 2960 has different port buffer management (I believe) from the 2950, often resulting in more port drops with bursty traffic.
True routers, like the 2800 series, I believe use a PCI bus, with additional bandwidth restrictions to the modules. They will well support the WAN bandwidths they are recommended for, but they do not well support LAN port bandwidths. Again, specific architecture details can be hard to come by.
