What exactly do you want to know? In any case I'd believe those are internals noone will give you.
Typically, every network device, be it a switch, router, firewall, .... contains a CPU and a network processor (the "ASIC"). Packet forwarding tasks are offloaded to the ASIC since it is a special purpose processor capable of doing that very fast, once it knows what to do (gets its instructions from the CPU).
That's mostly all there is to know unless you'd like to build switches from scratch. In which case I guess Extreme won't help you ?
