This little article just in from a dedicated Cisco engineer. Looks like Cisco is taking a “broadside” from Broadcom in the “TCP offload” universe.
Of course, notice the weasel words of “selected network streams”. In contrast, at InterProphet we showed a 10x advantage of all network streams on NT at Microsoft in their offices in Redmond in 1998 with a patented design.
So it’s taken Broadcom and Microsoft working together about 6 years to kind of make something work but not really. Not very impressive.
And SiliconTCP works for Unix and other OS’s as well. You don’t have to use Windows to get the benefit. In a world of “choice”, shouldn’t a chip be OS-agnostic? Or do they think choice is a bad idea?
Don’t know how often I read about a TCP offload mechanism which doesn’t really do the job. If a network stack worked like these chips, the Internet would be a lot more frustrating a place.
But I doubt Cisco cares, even though their engineers do. With China’s massive Huawei on the bottom end and ruthless Broadcom moving in, don’t bet on Cisco to defend their turf. After all, they’re too big to beat, right? And if a company lets things go long enough, figuring that “someone else I like better will invent it”, they take the risk someone they don’t like will do it.