Broadcom Introduces New PCI Express GigE Controller

Broadcom announced the latest chip offering in its NetXtreme II family of Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) converged network interface controllers (C-NICs). The new NetXtreme II C-NIC is the first to support the PCI Express bus architecture and its supports a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE), iSCSI, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) on a single-chip platform.


Broadcom's C-NIC technology enables network protocol processing to be offloaded from the host to the C-NIC, thereby saving the server's CPU and memory I/O resources to perform their primary tasks.


The new chip represents the second generation of C-NIC silicon solutions from Broadcom. The first generation C-NIC is now in volume production. The new C-NIC is sampling to early access customers. Since PCI Express is the preferred LOM connection interface on most servers being designed today, Broadcom has enabled major server OEMs to incorporate the BCM5708 C-NIC into industry standard high-volume servers currently under development.

http://www.broadcom.com