Network processors provide an economical programmable platform to handle the high throughput and frame rates of modern and next-generation communication systems. However, these platforms have exchanged general-purpose capabilities for performance.

This paper presents an alternative; a software framework for commodity general-purpose architectures capable of high-rate and throughput sequential frame processing compatible with high-level languages and general-purpose operating system. A cache-optimized concurrent lock free queue provides the low-overhead core-to-core communication necessary to sustain sequential frame processing rates beyond the 1.41 million frames per second realized on gigabit Ethernet while permitting per-frame processing time expansion with pipeline parallelism.