[e2e] Re: [tcpm] Re: Are you interested in TOEs and related issues

[Jeremy Harris]

stanislav shalunov wrote:
> Sunay Tripathi <Sunay.Tripathi at eng.sun.com> writes:
>>2) On low end (1-2 CPU) x86 based machines, cost of adding a processor
>>   is much higher than adding a TOE (I personally haven't verified this).
> 
> 
> It's not obvious why this should necessarily be the case, given that
> it is likely that there will continue to be quite a bit more
> general-purpose CPUs made than TCP offload engines.

It's because cache-coherency is expensive.  x86 boxes have traditionally
avoided playing far into this space.  Looked at from that angle,
TOE is towards the far end of the ncNUMA scale, and coherency
is managed by software.

- Jeremy