Methods and apparatuses for processing data channels

A system and method for processing an extremely high data rate datastream. Embodiments of the invention provide methods for performing various operations on the datastream in order to map the datastream from one protocol to another as well as providing methods for processing multiple channels of a given protocol. For one embodiment of the invention a portion of a datastream is received to a stream buffer. A data stream window is then created from the received portion, the data stream window containing data of more than one protocol. A corresponding portion of the data of a same protocol, is accessed through each of a plurality of processing machines. The accessed data is concurrently processed at each of the processing machines.