I think this paper vastly underestimates memory constraints of higher performance systems.
I think this paper vastly underestimates memory constraints of higher performance systems.
From a quick skim, the Xilinx work synthesises the entire network stack (including TCP) in hardware, unlike the above study, which only supports UDP in the HW traffic manager.
The numbers in the Xilinx paper are more attractive than what this study found and the paper also includes power measurements (since Joule/request is one metric on which FPGAs and hardware do quite well compared to software).
That said, much of the latency gain likely comes from bypassing the OS kernel and its generalised network stack. There is plenty of existing work (unfortunately also not referenced in this paper) that does this and which achieves very low latency, albeit -- to be fair -- on x86 hardware. (Examples: Arrakis [1], IX [2] and MICA [3].)
[1] -- https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-sessions/...
[2] -- https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-sessions/...
[3] -- https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi14/technical-sessions/...