The BCM5706 provides a fully integrated Layer 4 and Layer 5 solution
- TCP/IP, RDMA and iSCSI 1.0/iSER along with a complete 10/100/
1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE 802.3 compliant Media Access
Control (MAC) and Physical Layer Transceiver solution for high
performance network applications. By itself the BCM5706 provides a
complete single-chip Gigabit Ethernet NIC with a TCP/IP Offload
Engine, RDMA NIC (RNIC), iSCSI 1.0/iSER HBA or LOM solution.
The BCM5706 is different from other network controllers because it can
process the TCP/IP and relevant L5 protocols on data directly from the
application buffers on the host, therefore relieving the host CPU from
these time-consuming operations. On the receive path, the BCM5706
processes the frame up to the highest layer supported present in it, e.g.,
the BCM5706 processes the frame for RDMA when the frame is an
RDMA frame.