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Intel Develops Hardware To Enhance TCP/IP Stacks

Posted by timothy on from the sure-that's-not-a-little-overspecific? dept.

RyuuzakiTetsuya writes "The Register is reporting that Intel is developing I/OAT, or I/O Acceleration Technology, which allows the CPU, the mobo chipset and the ethernet controller to help deal with TCP/IP overhead."

2 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ethernet controllers by afidel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, a gigabit adapter can't saturate a PCI bus by itself, 32bit 33MHz PCI is 133MB/s, gigabit is 100MB/s. Then there is 32bit 66MHz PCI, and if you want you could run a 32bit card at 133MHz as the standard supports it (though I've never heard of such a card, if you need 133MHz you generally also need 64bit but I assume a ADC could use the faster speed but not need the wider word size. The fastest current implementation of the slot local bus is 16 channel PCI-express which could handle 4 10gigabit adapters. The problem would be coming up with enough data to keep those pipes full, no disk subsystem is fast enough, and any meaningfull SQL transactions are going to be CPU limited on even the bigest of servers, so why would you need a bus with more bandwidth than that? Add to this the fact that servers which actually need more throughput have long had the faster PCI slots and you realize that it's not a problem in the real world.

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  2. Re:Ethernet controllers by Matt_Bennett · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The critical aspect you leave out is that Gigabit ethernet is (inherently) Full Duplex. That means that that a 32/33 PCI bus would be saturated at a gigabit out, but have no bandwidth for anything incoming.

    In truth, a gigabit ethernet card can saturate a 1X PCI-E link (2Gb/s after the 8B/10B encoding is removed), when sending small packets- basically due to packet overhead.