Intel to attack greedy TCP/IP stack

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Intel next year will plant itself square in the middle of the budding market for systems that speed network traffic by rolling out something called I/OAT.

I/OAT stands for I/O Acceleration Technology and it will be previewed for the first time at next month's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. Intel remains cagey about what exactly I/OAT is, but it dangled a few details today in front of reporters ahead of the IDF event.

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The problems in question relate to network slowdowns that occur as servers try to crunch through the TCP/IP 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. To that end, a number of companies such as Adaptec and Alacritech have developed TOE cards or TCP/IP Offload Engines. These cards plug into servers or storage systems and handle much of the network traffic.

Intel plans to sidestep the need for separate TOE cards by building this technology into its server processor package - the chip itself, chipset and network controller. This should reduce some of the time a processor typically spends waiting for memory to feed back information and improve overall application processing speeds.

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