Adding intelligence in the form of smarter silicon streamlines processing of data packets traversing mobile and data center networks. In particular, smart silicon enables next-generation networks to understand the criticality of data, then manipulate, prioritize and route it in ways that reduce overall traffic and accelerates the delivery of important digital information, such as real-time data for voice and video, on time.

General-purpose processors, which increasingly feature multiple cores, pervade network infrastructures. These processors drive switches and routers, firewalls and load-balancers, WAN accelerators and VPN gateways. None of these systems is fast enough, however, to keep pace with the data deluge on its own, and for a basic reason: general-purpose processors are designed purely for compute-centric, -class workloads and are not optimized for handling the unique network-centric workloads in current and next-generation infrastructures.

Smart silicon, however, can accelerate throughput for real-time workloads, such as high-performance packet processing, while ensuring deterministic performance over changing traffic demands.

Smart silicon typically features multiple cores of general-purpose processors complemented by multiple acceleration engines for common networking functions, such as packet classification with , processing and traffic management. Some of these acceleration engines are powerful enough to completely offload specialized packet processing tasks from general-purpose processors, making it possible to perform switching, routing and other networking functions entirely in fast path accelerators to vastly improve overall network performance. Offloading compute-intensive workloads to acceleration engines that are optimized for a particular workload can also deliver a significant performance-per-watt advantage over purely general-purpose processors.