Disclaimer
The Author of this posting offers the information contained within this posting without consideration and with the reader's understanding that there's no implied or expressed suitability or fitness for any purpose. Information provided is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as rendering professional advice of any kind. Usage of this posting's information is solely at reader's own risk.
Liability Disclaimer
In no event shall Author be liable for any damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of use, data or profit) arising out of the use or inability to use the posting's information even if Author has been advised of the possibility of such damage.
Posting
Switch fabric is one of the characteristics of a switch's performance. Usually, a fabric is some variation of a cross-bar architecture which allows different connections (to the fabric) to pass traffic between themselves without consideration of other fabric connections traffic. For example, ports 1 and 3 might communicate without being slowed by communication between ports 2 and 4, unlike a "bus" architecture where all 4 ports share the same internal bandwidth.
Fabric specifications have various characteristics too such as bandwidth, what actually constitutes connections to the fabric (e.g. single ports or port groups), amount of buffering, ingress/egress buffer management (i.e. head-of-line-blocking or not), etc.
