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I looked at the datasheet of a random modern Ethernet chip (ENC28J60) and it's simpler than I expected, doing much less than the old Intel chip, although it includes the low level "PHY" circuitry, which was a separate Intel chip in the olden days. I expect that the newer chip has things like 10-bit counters, but they would be implemented with standard cell logic (i.e. computer-generated layout of gates) rather than the hand-optimized circuitry of the Intel chip.

On the other hand, you can get a chip like the W5300 which includes the whole TCP/IP stack along with ARP and ICMP, presumably running on an internal microcontroller.

https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/O...

https://www.wiznet.io/wp-content/uploads/wiznethome/Chip/W53...




High end NICs like Mellanox ConnectX are probably more similar to the 82586 in terms of breadth of functionality. They have (R)DMA, hardware timestamping, encryption, etc. Although, I wouldn’t expect to see much hand crafted logic design outside of the very high speed signal paths like in the serdes.




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