Not speaking specifically of the OP case, but CPU gets less and less involved in the datapath starting from a certain requirement of the max throughput. Insisti

Not speaking specifically of the OP case, but CPU gets less and less involved in the datapath starting from a certain requirement of the max throughput. Insisting on it's going through the CPU still would raise the bar on the CPU (as a consequence, more fast RAM and increased overall power consumption, shorter battery life). > with a firmware I can't audit. In modern fast datapaths, there is a good deal of hardware acceleration involved, the firmware code would probably be incomprehensible without intimately knowing these.