The Performance Potential of an Integrated Network Interface
Nathan L. Binkert, Ronald Dreslinski, Erik G. Hallnor, Lisa R. Hsu, Steven E. Raasch, Andrew L. Schultz, Steven K. Reinhardt · 2004
High-bandwidth TCP/IP networking is a core component of current and future computer systems. Though networking is central to computing today, the vast majority of end-host networking research focuses on the current paradigm of the network interface being merely a peripheral device. Most optimizations focus solely on software changes or on moving some of the computation from the primary CPU to the off-chip network interface controller (NIC). We present an alternative approach for achieving high performance networking. Rather than increasing the complexity of the NIC, we directly integrate a conventional NIC on the CPU die.