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Comment by RachelF | Hacker News Reader

Also bear in mind that many of today's network cards have processors in them that handle much of the TCP/IP overhead.

Not just that but TLS too. Starting ConnectX-5 i think you can push kTLS down to nic. Dont think there’s a QUIC equivalent for this

That's mostly still for the data center. Which end-user network cards that I can buy can do TCP offloading?

Unless I’m missing something here, pretty much any Intel nic released in the past decade should support tcp offload. I imagine the same is true for Broadcom and other vendors as well, but I don’t have something handy to check.

Some wifi cards offload a surprising amount in order to do wake-on-wireless, but that's not for performance.

> Which end-user network cards that I can buy can do TCP offloading?

Intel's I210 controllers support offloading:

> Other performance-enhancing features include IPv4 and IPv6 checksum offload, TCP/UDP checksum offload, extended Tx descriptors for more offload capabilities, up to 256 KB TCP segmentation (TSO v2), header splitting, 40 KB packet buffer size, and 9.5 KB Jumbo Frame support.

* https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/327935/327935-Intel%20Ethern...

And cost US$ 22:

* https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0728289M7/

Practically every on-board network adapter I've had for over a decade has had TCP offload support. Even the network adapter on my cheap $300 Walmart laptop has hardware TCP offload support.

All of them. You'd be hard pressed to buy a new NIC which doesn't have a raft of protocol offloads.

Even those garbage tg3 things from 1999 that OEMs are still putting onboard of enterprise servers have some TCP offload capability.

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