Some people have calculated that about 4 Xeon CPU cores are required to process a 10G network at line speed. That is to say, just processing network data packets takes up half the computing power of an 8-core high-end CPU. Now that data center networks are constantly being upgraded, from 10G to 40G, 100G, and even 400G high-speed networks, how can these performance overheads be tolerated?
These expenses are so large that they are called the “Datacenter Tax.”
The business program has not yet run, and just accessing network data consumes so much computing resources, which is unbearable. Therefore, some companies have proposed the concept of SmartNIC (smart network card), which “offloads” the work of network protocol processing from the CPU to the network card, so as to share the load of the CPU.