A system for providing oversubscription of pipeline bandwidth comprises a steer module, an absorption buffer, an ingress packet processor (IPP), a memory management unit (MMU), and a main packet buffer. The steer module receives packets that include start of packet (SOP), middle of packet (MOP), and end of packet (EOP) cells, attaches a packet identifier to the cells, passes the MOP and EOP cells to the MMU, and stores the SOP cells and EOP metadata in the absorption buffer. The IPP processes the SOP cells and EOP metadata and passes the same to the MMU. The MMU stores the MOP, EOP, and processed SOP cells in the main packet buffer, combines, upon receiving the processed EOP metadata of each packet, the processed SOP cell, the MOP cells and the EOP cell of each packet to reconstruct each packet, and queues each reconstructed packet in an egress port queue.