Don't modern NICs do a lot of the same, too?

Sometimes it goes the other direction. PCI SSL accelerator cards were a thing for a long time before CPUs got faster, got various crypto acceleration opcodes, web servers rewrote SSL logic in ASM, etc.

The fancy Mellanox NVIDIA Connect-X cards have kTLS support which offloads encryption to the NIC, Netflix has blogged about how they use it to send 100 Gbps encrypted traffic of a single box (Their OpenConnect infrastructure is really cool).

Old is new again :)