A compute engine includes a central processing unit coupled to a coprocessor.
The
coprocessor includes a media access controller engine and a data transfer engine.
The media access controller engine couples the compute engine to a communications
network. The data transfer engine couples the media access controller engine to
a set of cache memory. In further embodiments, a compute engine includes two media
access controller engines. A reception media access controller engine receives
data from the communications network. A transmission media access controller engine
transmits data to the communications network. The compute engine also includes
two data transfer engines. A streaming output engine stores network data from the
reception media access controller engine in cache memory. A streaming input engine
transfers data from cache memory to the transmission media access controller engine.
In one implementation, the compute engine performs different network services,
including but not limited to: 1) virtual private networking; 2) secure sockets
layer processing; 3) web caching; 4) hypertext mark-up language compression; 5)
virus checking; 6) firewall support; and 7) web switching.
