[kev009]

Sort of. It ebbs and flows, generally more maintainable to do more in CPU/kernel and less in HW/firmware for PCs and of course price runs the market so there's a race to do less. Part of the mainframe price tag is getting long term support on the whole system stack, whereas PC vendors actively abandon stuff after a few years. That is a big risk for something like TCP offload engine.

Every mainframe interface is basically an offload interface.. "computers" DMAing and processing to the CPs and each other. Every I/O device has a command processor, so it can handle channel errors and integrated pcie errors in a way PCs cannot.

A PC with Chelsio NICs doing TCP offload with direct data placement or RDMA as well as Fiber Channel storage would be mini/mainframe-ish.