| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Virtual NIC support | The core of AMD Solarflare technology. Protected VNIC interfaces can be instantiated for each running guest operating system or application, giving it a direct pipeline to the Ethernet network. This architecture provides the most efficient way to maximize network and CPU efficiency. The X4 series Ethernet controller supports up to 2048 VNIC interfaces per port. |
| PCI Express® | Implements PCI Express Gen5. |
| High Performance | Support for 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and a new internal datapath micro architecture. |
| Hardware Switch Fabric | Full hardware switch fabric in silicon capable of steering any flow based on Layer 2, Layer 3 or application level protocols between physical and virtual interfaces within the same instance of the Enterprise datapath.. |
| Improved flow processing | The addition of dedicated parsing, filtering, traffic shaping and flow steering engines which are capable of operating flexibly and with an optimal combination of a full hardware data plane with software based control plane. |
| Cut Through PIO (CTPIO) | TX packets are streamed directly from the PCIe interface to the adapter port bypassing the main TX datapath to deliver lowest TX latency. |
| Multicast Replication | Received multicast packets are replicated in hardware and delivered to multiple receive queues. |
| Sideband management |
X4 series Ethernet adapters support the following manageability protocols:
X4 series Ethernet adapters support the following manageability transports:
|
| Receive Side Scaling (RSS) | IPv4 and IPv6 RSS raises the utilization levels of multi-core servers dramatically by distributing I/O load across all CPUs and cores. |
| Stateless offloads | Through the addition of hardware based TCP segmentation and reassembly offloads, VLAN, VxLAN, and NVGRE offloads. |
| Jumbo frame support | Support for up to 9100 byte jumbo frames on the Enterprise datapath. |
| MSI-X support | Support for 2048 MSI-X interrupts per port enables higher levels of performance. |
| Ultra low latency | Cut through architecture. < 7µs end to end latency with standard kernel drivers, < 1µs with Onload drivers. |
| Remote boot | Support for diskless booting to a target operating system via UEFI boot or PXE over UEFI. |
| MAC address filtering | Enables the hardware to steer packets based on the MAC address to a VNIC. |
| Hardware timestamps | X4 series adapters support hardware timestamping for all packets, sent and received, including PTP. The adapters incorporate a highly accurate Stratum 3 compliant oscillator with drift of 0.37 PPM per day (c. 32 ms/day). |
| FEC | Forward Error Correction is supported. This employs redundancy in channel coding as a technique used to reduce bit errors (BER) in noisy or unreliable communications channels. |
| AN/LT | Auto-Negotiation/Link Training is supported. |