I worked for another NIC vendor at the time, and we were totally in awe of the 8259x. We had a 10G NIC that could do line rate with full packets, but we did a

I worked for another NIC vendor at the time, and we were totally in awe of the 8259x. We had a 10G NIC that could do line rate with full packets, but we did a lot of PCIe in firmware, so we could only handle ~1.5Mpps (about 10% of line rate in terms of pps).