I don't understand articles that do benchmarks like infiniband or Ethernet, but set up a system where the nic is limiting the test. It would be useful to do the same thing with enough cards to saturate the memory bandwidth.
Basically no one runs that way. And in this article they're not benchmarking two systems against each other but different tuning parameters for one system. And if the tuning helps then the NIC wasn't the limit.
No one runs what way? Running with multiple NICs is very common. You can see in the graph that it peaks at line rate very early. Running a multiple NIC test would have resolved that.
