A system, method, and apparatus are provided for external device-based prefetching mechanism. According to one embodiment, a packet is received at a network interface card in communication with a host computer system and a network. The packet is received from the network and includes a context as indicated by a packet address. Then, lookup in packet context table is performed. If a match is found, the received packet is associated with host memory addresses that are sent by the NIC to the processor as prefetch directives. The packet is then forwarded to the host computer system.