TOE or TCP Offload Engine as it is known is considered to be a technology that is commonly used in NIC (network interface cards) for offloading processing to network controller of the whole TCP/IP stack. Basically, TCP/IP offload engine Full TCP Offload is used exclusively with the hi-speed network interfaces like the 10 Gigabit Ethernet and gigabit Ethernet, where network stack processing overhead becomes significant.
Know the term
Low latency TOE is a term that is often used for referring to the NIC, even though it may be used by the circuit board engineers referring just to integrated circuit which is found on the card. TCP headers are processed by it. 10G FPGA NIC TOEs are rather regarded to be way for reducing overhead which is associated with the different IP protocols like NFS and ISCSI.
Its purpose
TCP originally has been designed for those unreliable low-speed networks like the dial up models. However, with the development of the net with regards to backbone transmission speeds (making use of Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet links and Optical Carrier), including reliable and faster reliable access mechanisms (like cable modems and DSL), desktop PC environments and data centers make frequent usage. The speeds at this place is more than 1 Gigabit / second. TCP offload NIC implementations on the host system do need extensive computing power.
TCP is regarded to be connection oriented protocol to add processing overhead and complexity. The main CPU of the system is freed for the other tasks by having the different functions moved onto dedicated hardware.