Wire speed or wirespeed refers to the hypothetical maximum data transmission rate of a cable or other transmission medium. The wire speed is dependent on the physical and electrical properties of the cable, combined with the lowest level of the connection protocols.
When used as an adjective, wire speed describes any hardware device or function that processes data without reducing the overall transmission rate. It is common to refer to functions embedded in microchips as working at wire speed, especially when compared to those implemented in software. Network switches, routers, and similar devices are sometimes described as operating at wire speed. Data encryption and decryption and hardware emulation are software functions that might run at wire speed (or close to it) when embedded in a microchip.
The wire speed is rarely achieved in connections between computers due to CPU limitations, disk read/write overhead, or contention for resources. However, it is still a useful concept for estimating the theoretical best throughput, and how far the real-life performance falls short of the maximum.
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