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by drewg123 1867 days ago
What? Why do you think the Intel 100GbE NIC is good?

We've been quite happy with Mellanox and Chelsio 100GbE NICs. The latest from each can do in-line HW TLS offload, which is a killer feature for us. No Intel NIC can do that.

IMHO the last good Intel NIC was the 10GbE "ixgbe" NIC. The design of the NIC was so tight as to be almost beautiful.

Recent 40GbE (and 10GbE based on the 40GbE chipset), and the new 100GbE NIC have the feel of being designed by a committee with endless features of questionable value stuffed in and consuming power and chip area.
1 comments
walrus01 1867 days ago
Primarily the state of its Linux driver, and rock solid support in VyOS (derived from Debian stable). For a router, TLS offload isn't so much of a consideration when the system isn't doing anything at layers 4-7 in the OSI model.

If I had to make a perhaps overly broad generalization, I see more Chelsio and Mellanox NICs used in end point servers, and more Intel used in DIY whitebox network equipment.

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drewg123 1867 days ago
That's fair; I come at this from a CDN perspective where end system performance is most important.

Do you see any benefit from the fancy features? Can it source/sink min sized frames at 100GbE? (144Mpps) ?

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