On 03/02/2016 13:51, T i m wrote:

However, there do seem to be such things offered by the likes of Intel
themselves and to offer high performance but maybe you are right and
it's just a sales exercise (these days)?

You buy them for servers when you need more ports than are on board.
Have a look at a recommended setup for a hypervisor with no single
points of failure. That's the market - it's not a sales exercise.