A CPU bottleneck is another way of saying that a CPU is overloaded and unable to process all of the requests that want its attention. A CPU bottleneck won’t cause physical damage to your network. However, if the CPU in question is in a switch, the excess demand on the processor will initially cause packets to be queued for processing and once the queue is full, no further packets can be dealt with and so will just be dropped. This situation causes a high degree of packet loss on the network. If the overloaded CPU is on a server, it can actually help the network because the limited capabilities of the processor slow down the amount of data that can be passed to the network. In this instance, increasing CPU capacity on a server could end up overloading a switch and just move the bottleneck to some other part of the system.