On a technical level this wouldn't be too surprising. Cavium hardware has things like configurable/programmable in hardware hashing of packets which can then be

On a technical level this wouldn't be too surprising. Cavium hardware has things like configurable/programmable in hardware hashing of packets which can then be used by the (much slower, but in the Cavium case numerous) CPUs to decide how to handle it. Their SoCs contain enough that hiding something on there would not be impossible, and using the hashing/routing etc. that enabled performance requires trusting blobs from Cavium.