Hi Ali

Hardware switched means that there are dedicated ASIC's (Application Specfic Integrated Chips) that do the work. These chips are not like CPU's in your PC, they only do a few things but they do them very efficiently and very quickly.

So for example to route a packet a router uses part of it's CPU to make the decisions etc, whereas a L3 switch has a dedicated chip that does this which takes the load of the main CPU.

Hope this makes sense

Jon