equates to eight 2.5 GHz cores. Many of the CPU cycles used for TCP/IP processing are freed-up by TCP/IP offload and may be used by the CPU (usually a server CPU) to perform other tasks such as file system processing (in a file server) or indexing (in a backup media server). In other words, a server with TCP/IP offload can do more server work than a server without TCP/IP offload NICs. Reduction of PCI traffic In addition to the protocol overhead that TOE can address, it can also address some architectural issues that affect a large percentage of host based (server and PC) endpoints. Many older end point hosts are PCI bus based, which provides a standard interface for the addition of certain peripherals such as Network Interfaces to Servers and PCs. PCI is inefficient for transferring small bursts of data from main memory, across the PCI bus to the network interface ICs, but its efficiency improves as the data burst size increases. Within the TCP protocol, a large number of small packets are created (e.g. acknowledgements) and as these are typically generated on the host CPU and transmitted across the PCI bus and out the network physical interface, this impacts the host computer IO throughput. A TOE solution, located on the network interface, is located on the other side of the PCI bus from the CPU host so it can address this I/O efficiency issue, as the data to be sent across the TCP connection can be sent to the TOE from the CPU across the PCI bus using large data burst sizes with none of the smaller TCP packets having to traverse the PCI bus. History One of the first patents in this technology, for UDP offload, was issued to Auspex Systems in early 1990. Auspex founder Larry Boucher and a number of Auspex engineers went on to found Alacritech in 1997 with the idea of extending the concept of network stack offload to TCP and implementing it in custom silicon. They introduced the first parallel-stack full offload network card in early 1999; the company's SLIC (Session Layer Interface Card) was the predecessor to its current TOE offerings. Alacritech holds a number of patents in the area of TCP/IP offload. By 2002, as the emergence of TCP-based storage such as iSCSI spurred interest, it was said that "At least a dozen newcomers, most founded toward the end of