Patent ID: 7181544

Claim:
A Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) off-load system, the system comprising: a first interface circuitry to receive at least a portion of an Internet Protocol packet encapsulating a TCP segment; and extract data from the at least a portion of the Internet Protocol packet including, at least, the Internet Protocol source address, the Internet Protocol destination address, the source port, and the destination port; wherein the first interface circuitry is clocked at a first clock signal having a first frequency; a second interface to a host processor; and an off-load system processor to process the TCP segment for the host processor, the off-load system processor to, at least, generate a TCP acknowledgement (ACK) message for the received TCP segment and to transmit a payload of the TCP segment to the host processor via the second interface, the off-load system processor clocked at a second clock signal having a second frequency different than the first frequency wherein the second frequency is determined based on packet size.