comparison and a second group of subentries which store a different type of data can be selected for a second parallel comparison furthermore besides partitioning each entry to include two subentries cam manager 110 partitions each entry to include more than two subentries for example each entry e g entries 0 15 in cam 70 shown in fig5 is partitioned to include u201c n u201d subentries in another example each entry is partitioned by the cam manager 110 to include a single subentry that is a combination of two or more smaller subentries for example each entry in cam 80 shown in fig6 includes a combination of two subentries to produce one larger subentry referring to fig9 another portion of a cam manager 120 such as cam manager 58 that is executed in packet engine 48 stores 122 data in subentries included in one or more entries of a cam for example the cam manager 120 stores different types of data in groups of subentries during one time period the cam manager 120 receives 124 data for comparing against a portion of the data stored in the cam to detect one or more matches for example a mac address associated with a received packet can be compared against a group of mac addresses respectively stored in a group of subentries cam manager 120 selects 126 the particular group of subentries to compare to the received data for example the group of subentries.