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To: James Connolly who wrote (8028)	6/28/2000 5:35:00 PM
From: Bob Huff	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

James, These products don't involve I2O. The offloading you referenced is just TCP checksum offload. It's one optimization among others that attempts to minimize system overhead at the sending/receiving hosts when dealing with TCP/IP. 3Com NICs have similar features. Let me try to explain this quickly - let's use TCP checksum as an example. To detect data corruption in the network, TCP/IP generates an end-to-end checksum for each packet. Software (ie the OS) running on the host CPU computes these checksums. This requires the CPU to load all of this data thru the memory hierarchy which can be time consuming. This cost can be eliminated by computing the checksum in hardware on the NIC as the packet passes through on its way to or from host memory. The TCP/IP stack and network device driver must cooperate for checksum offloading to work. These optimizations will become increasing more popular as vendors try to get the full width of the pipe to the desktop. Bob