I was describing raw data shovelling throughput. Of course there's going to be per-packet overhead. 100Mbps internet connections were quite rare 20 years ago, so the point still stands that for a layman / average home LAN, general purpose CPUs can shovel an impressive amount of network traffic.
Sure, you'll likely need purpose-made hardware above a certain amount of throughput. I suspect that practical threshold these days is between 1Gps and 10Gbps, although it's a much grayer line than it was 20 years ago. The network interfaces are likely the bottleneck rather than the CPU's ability to shovel, and latency will always be higher than dedicated hardware.
There will of course always be a need for hardware to go faster than what a CPU can do. Tbps is becoming a unit folk use regularly.
Sure, you'll likely need purpose-made hardware above a certain amount of throughput. I suspect that practical threshold these days is between 1Gps and 10Gbps, although it's a much grayer line than it was 20 years ago. The network interfaces are likely the bottleneck rather than the CPU's ability to shovel, and latency will always be higher than dedicated hardware.
There will of course always be a need for hardware to go faster than what a CPU can do. Tbps is becoming a unit folk use regularly.