The BCM5706 provides a fully integrated Layer 4 and Layer 5 solution - TCP/IP, RDMA and iSCSI 1.0/iSER along with a complete 10/100/ 1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE 802.3 compliant Media Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer Transceiver solution for high performance network applications. By itself the BCM5706 provides a complete single-chip Gigabit Ethernet NIC with a TCP/IP Offload Engine, RDMA NIC (RNIC), iSCSI 1.0/iSER HBA or LOM solution. The BCM5706 is different from other network controllers because it can process the TCP/IP and relevant L5 protocols on data directly from the application buffers on the host, therefore relieving the host CPU from these time-consuming operations. On the receive path, the BCM5706 processes the frame up to the highest layer supported present in it, e.g., the BCM5706 processes the frame for RDMA when the frame is an RDMA frame.