As data sets scale exponentially and workloads in AI, analytics, and high-speed networking become more demanding, maximizing CPU efficiency is more critical than ever.
If your applications heavily rely on data compression/decompression or complex cryptographic ciphers, you might be burning through valuable CPU cycles. Enter Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT).
What Is Intel® QAT?
Intel® QAT is a built-in workload accelerator integrated directly into the silicon of modern Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (including the 4th Gen, 5th Gen, and the new Intel® Xeon 6 with E-cores). Instead of relying on power-hungry external PCIe add-in cards, QAT offloads and processes massive cryptography and data compression tasks right at the chip level.
Why Developers & Infrastructure Engineers Should Care:
Frees Up Core CPU Cycles: By offloading compute-heavy encrypt/decrypt and compression tasks, your primary CPU cores remain fully dedicated to core application execution.
Massive Performance Leaps: Benchmarks show up to 9x to 137x faster hardware-accelerated compression in Red Hat Enterprise Linux compared to standard software-based compression.
Lower TCO & High Scalability: Handle more simultaneous encrypted client connections (like VPNs, load balancers, or CDNs) with a smaller overall data footprint and fewer cores.
Storage Acceleration: Speeds up heavy backup and archiving tasks for distributed storage systems, supporting advanced algorithms like Zstandard for significant throughput improvements.
Whether you are optimizing enterprise databases like Microsoft SQL Server, speeding up hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), or securing network traffic, Intel® QAT is a game-changer for modern, data-heavy applications.
Want to see the full performance benchmarks, learn how to assess your system design, and find out how to configure the QAT drivers and libraries?
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