> I.e.: Why does memory bandwidth matter to TLS? Aren't you encrypting data "on the fly", while it is still resident in the CPU caches? I assume NF's software

> I.e.: Why does memory bandwidth matter to TLS? Aren't you encrypting data "on the fly", while it is still resident in the CPU caches? I assume NF's software pipeline is zero copy, so if TLS is done in the NIC data only gets read from memory once when it is DMA'd to the NIC. With software TLS you need to read the data from memory (assuming it's not already in cache, which given the size of data NF deals with is unlikely), encrypt it, then write it back out to main memory so it can be DMA'd to the NIC. I know Intel has some fancy tech that can DMA directly to/from the CPU's cache, but I don't think AMD has that capability (yet).