The Quiet Death Of Intelligent NICs?

Captain Novell asks: "Have you ever wondered what happened to the likes of the Intel Intelligent Server Adaptor? I have, one day it was on their site and then, later...*poof*...it was gone, only to be replaced by this Windows 2000 IP/Sec card! With tears in my eyes I went looking for any other manufacturer that had Intelligent NICs, but all I could found was this IP/Sec rubbish! (for those of us who run OSI complient software, a TRUE intelligent adaptor will off-load part of the OSI stack to the card and usually has some form of large cache on-board a.k.a. the old Intel Intelligent Adaptor card. I recommend server adaptors to many sys admins! Does the Slashdot community have any advice on where I can still find these elusive devices?"

Comments

Intelligent Nics Considered Harmful

[Russ Nelson]

Didn't Van Jacobsen show that intelligent nics actually slow down your networking? The main loop of the TCP/IP protocol is quite small. If you're careful to cause the error conditions to be the taken part of the jump, then on modern machines the prefetch will always get it right.

With an intelligent nic, you're going to spend just as much memory bandwidth on the transfer as you would if the protocol is in the main processor. You're just not saving anything with an intelligent nic. The price premium causes them to be *much* more expensive that a regular nic, plus you have to write the stack that runs on it, plus you have to have operating system support for a stack on the card. All for what? No extra performance.
-russ