Ashlee Vance wrote that Intel will be introducting “I/O Acceleration Technology” to “attack greedy TCP/IP stack” consumption – in other words, latency through the stack. “Customers often find that their servers spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with network traffic when they should be hammering away on application data.” This sounds very familiar – we told them years ago that “all processors wait at the same speed”.
Back in 1997, when I filed a provisional patent on just such an approach, I had an interesting meeting with Intel’s processor side. We called the technique ROSE then, for Reordering Segment Engine for a product we envisioned called the Network Accelerator – and yes, this was before Adaptec and Alacritech and all those other TOE guys. It was the first in a series of parallel processing refinements, which dealt with the layer 2-7 issues of TCP/IP (the discussion was under NDA).