This reminds me of an article from approximately a decade ago about how enterprise networking gear could be less expensive if the designs leveraged more RAM instead of L1/2 cache. Apparently Cisco IOS and it's state predominantly existed in fast but costly CPU cache. The latency savings of having everything in the CPU cache was not worth it, according to the author.

All that being said, I'm really not qualified to speak in detail about the underlying implementation. Networking is not my background. Also, a lot of this stuff is probably changed since then. For example, Cisco IOS-XE and IOS-XR have gained prominence. Both of those are based on Linux and probably means lots of changes under the hood.