SmartNIC
Beginner
A network card with its own brain. It handles network jobs so the main processor doesn’t have to.
Novice
A network interface card that can be programmed to process packets itself, for example applying a cloud’s security and routing rules, so the server’s CPUs are freed for customers. It can be built from an FPGA, many small CPU cores, or a fixed-function chip.
Expert
A NIC with programmable data-plane offload (flow tables, encapsulation, encryption, load balancing). FPGA versions sit as a bump in the wire between host and switch; SoC versions trade latency and jitter for software programmability; ASIC versions trade flexibility for efficiency.
Explained in Where FPGAs win (Architectures).
See also: NIC (network interface card), FPGA.