In high frequency trading, the latency gold standard is 200 nanoseconds. If you're an equity trader using a Bloomberg Terminal or Thomson Reuters Eikon, latency of more than 200 nanoseconds is considered to be shockingly pedestrian, putting you at risk of buying or selling a stock at a higher or lower price than the one you saw quoted. Now, with its announcement of TCPDirect, Solarflare said it has cut latency by 10X, to 20-30 nanoseconds.

High frequency trading occurs because it is highly profitable. It would have to be a regulatory step to have all orders execute precisely say at the top of each second. No inter-second trading. This would get rid of the advantages of sub-second racing. Until then it is profitable

Solarflare Communications is an unheralded soldier in the eternal war on latency. With its founding in 2001, Solarflare took on the daunting raison d'être of grinding down latency from one product generation to the next for the most latency-sensitive use cases, such as high frequency trading. Today, the company has more than 1,400 customers using its networking I/O software and hardware to cut the time between decision and action.