One of the big easy advantages of NPs was direct to L2 cache I/O (instead of PCI to northbridge to DRAM to cache miss to cache). Intel now has this. NPs do st

One of the big easy advantages of NPs was direct to L2 cache I/O (instead of PCI to northbridge to DRAM to cache miss to cache). Intel now has this. NPs do still have hardware schedulers and other features, but Intel has much stronger CPUs. Anyway, I hope Cavium succeeds with their Thunder. Perhaps there is a large enough "anything but Intel" market for them in the microserver world. NXP still exists in Netronome..