Switched fabrics have been around for several years now, but with the advent of platforms such as ATCA, MicroATCA, VXS and VPX, their use is set to be ubiquitous. No longer is the fabric connection an afterthought, shoehorned into an architecture that was never designed to support such throughput, but it is now an integral part of the architecture, allowing for interconnects that are balanced with compute power now available with multi-gigahertz clock speeds and multiple cores.