Remember the days when Microsoft 's DOS had 640kb of memory. You had to squeeze every last bit of memory out of DOS and offload the network protocols to smart adapters. I worked at Madge Networks and they did this very well. Initially Madge Networks used chipsets from Texas Instruments but later used that experience and knowledge to develop their own token-ring ASIC which implemented in networking kit most notably some kickass switches. Today we still have network controllers that offload the network protocol stack, namely the Intel Corporation Ethernet ones. They do a damn good job and those NICs are the best in the business. Largely because of performance and processor optimization. The network processing is wirespeed and the processor isn't stressed. But largely the play is now not what you offload but what's in the Linux kernel. As an example Wireguard in the Linux kernel is up to 6 times faster than IPSEC. Moving IPSEC to an ASIC isn't going