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?

[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.

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?

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.