The Sun Multithreaded Quad Gigabit Ethernet Networking Cards host four high-performance Gigabit interfaces in a single PCIe slot to provide high bandwidth server-to-server and server-to-switch connections while conserving valuable PCIe slots and providing a lower cost per port. It extends CPU and OS parallelism to networking with its support for Solaris logical domains (LDOMs), hardware-based flow classification and multiple Direct Memory Access (DMA) channels. By reducing CPU processing loads with packet parsing, hardware check sum generation and interrupt coalescing, the adapter can also help increase server efficiency and mitigate network congestion.