TR Forums

Hi,

I often heard that the CPU is the bottleneck especially when we use a high bandwidth network.
So my questions are :
-> There is a CPU in the NIC ? for example, in the intel x520
-> If yes, can we do some process on it ? like encapsulated or desencapsulated or other in order to reduce CPU offload ??

Thank you.

My NIC driver has the ability to turn off offloading....

Yes, the NIC has the ability to do some processing onboard. On inexpensive NICs, this is very rudimentary (e.g. accepting/rejecting packets based on MAC address, maybe some checksum calculations). On more expensive server-class NICs, the NIC contains a full-blown embedded CPU of its own which is capable of offloading more of the work.

My Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
Has

IPv4 Checksum Offload
Large Send Offload v2 (IPv4)
Large Send Offload v2 (IPv6)
TCP Checksum Offload(IPv4)
TCP Checksum Offload(IPv6)
UDP Checksum Offload(IPv4)
UDP Checksum Offload(IPv6)
Interrupt Moderation