Intel Develops Hardware To Enhance TCP/IP Stacks

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."

Comments

Good stuff!

[kernelistic]

First checksum offloading, now this... It is nice to see that hardware vendors are realizing that 10Gbit/s+ speeds aren't currently realistic without extra forms of computation support from the underlying network interface hardware.

This is Good News.

White elephant?

[Toby The Economist]

I think in Tannenbaum's book there's a reference which states that offloading network processing normally isn't useful, because the CPU that work is offloaded to is always less powerful than the main CPU and the main CPU is normally blocked in it's task until the network processing has completed.

--
Toby

Re:White elephant?

[mr_zorg]

I think in Tannenbaum's book there's a reference which states that offloading network processing normally isn't useful, because the CPU that work is offloaded to is always less powerful than the main CPU and the main CPU is normally blocked in it's task until the network processing has completed.

I think in xyz's book there's a reference which states that offloading graphics processing normally isn't useful, because the CPU that work is offloaded to is always less powerful than the main CPU and the main CPU is normally blocked in it's task until the graphics processing has completed.

See how silly that sounds when you substitute network with graphics? We all know that offloading graphics processing is a good thing. Why? Because it's optimized for the task. Why couldn't the same be done for networking?

Re:White elephant?

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

See how silly that sounds when you substitute network with graphics?

Well, does waiting 3 milliseconds at 3 GHz outrun waiting 3 milliseconds at 300 MHz?

The only advantage I can see to this is that it's often nice to have I/O handled in a separate process/thread running on a separate processor. But, as many have already noted, unless the I/O processor is tuned for this you've either got another expensive processor or you're running the I/O thread on a slower processor.

If the processor _is_ tuned for this purpose, it's already been done. Most Ethernet i/f cards have a fair amount of intelligence on them already, and complete stacks have been available on cards for about as long as I've been aware of ethernet. (twenty years?)

Re:White elephant?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Graphics and networking are two very different things. Networking isn't compute intensive, it is I/O intensive. I don't think the Intel hardware network offload is for much more than basic computation.

Besides, GPUs are more powerful than CPUs at the task of rendering polygons.

Very often ASICs are better at a task than general purpose CPUs, just that considerations must be made as to whether the performance gain is worth the cost difference.

Ethernet controllers

[Anonymous Coward]

What is needed more is a high-speed bus for network interfaces, as gigabit ethernet becomes more common. Even if a gigabit adapter had a whole 32-bit PCI bus to itself, it could still easily saturate it.

It seems like most common denominator board manufacturers have put off 64-bit PCI support for too long. It's going to bite them in the ass if it doesn't become standard very soon.

nvidia

[Ecio]

Isnt Nvidia doing the same with his new nforce serie motherboards? lowering cpu usage by adding network management code and a SPI firewall inside the chipset?

Will it support IPv6?

[arc.light]

The article doesn't say, and I'd hate to be "stuck" with a card that only does IPv4. Yeah, I know, hardly anyone uses IPv6 today, but the nations of China and Japan, as well as the US DoD, are starting to roll out IPv6 networks in a big way.

So, now hackers will target your BIOS rather than

[ABeowulfCluster]

targeting the OS. I can see this technology being useful on servers which have multiple network cards and heavy traffic, but not for joe average pc user.

And the integrated DRM?

[tjlsmith]

and how much DRM are they going to build onto the motherboard, just in passing?

Don't think for a minute the big boys aren't trying to take the Internet away from us. The missed the opportunity once, never twice.

Similar to what Jolitzes have been up to?

[Hobart]

A while ago I looked up what the original authors of BSD-on-the-386 ( 386bsd ) authors had been up to, I just searched again and found http://www.interprophet.com and http://www.telemuse.net ...

Their new gig was putting the TCP/IP stack into the silicon for performance, the Internet Archive version says they've been at it since 1989...

I wonder if Intel licensed their patents, or if this is similar stuff...