hmm... yeah that's what I thought. And yes, the best case might be have hundreds of these "systems on a chip" on a custom board with it's internal bus (PCI-whatever) with avirtual eth0's visible on each internal system. This whole rigmarole could be connected to the rest of the network via a couple of 10G networks. Then some flavor of SDN would work to divide the bandwidth in a fair manner among the boxes.

But doing all that custom electronics does take the fun out of the idea of "just a bunch of cheap raspberry pi's doing their thing". So maybe not.