A high speed switching device including an aggregator, a plurality of intermediate ports, and ingress packet processing resources, is disclosed. The aggregator includes an external switch port operatively coupled to a transport medium, and a demultiplexer that divides an ingress data stream into a plurality of intermediate streams. The plurality of intermediate ports transmit the intermediate streams to ingress packet processing resources. The ingress packet processing resource may include one or more classification devices for parsing, switching or routing, and queueing packets of the ingress stream, prior to transmission to a switching fabric. The switching device optionally includes an egress processor for multiplexing egress data from the switching fabric. Intermediate port traffic may be dynamically modified to minimize load imbalance present in an ingress switching device and or egress switching device. Load balancing may further be achieved by optimization of the physical wiring connections between the aggregator and classification devices.