Intuitively, the number of packets to be analyzed and forwarded in parallel should be limited by the number of cores that perform the analysis; for regular GPUs, one can have as many as hundreds such cores.
in practice, the number of parallel decisions is limited by the available memory bandwidth of the system: if every unit accesses memory in a short enough time interval, the memory bandwidth is quickly saturated, and the amount of concurrency in the sys­tem decreases.