Supported speed of sdcard?

[humanitypeace]

It seems that allwinner chips interface to the sd-card is limited to either 16MB/s (in the sunxi-kernels) and
23MB/s max of 50Mhz 4bit bus on the mainline as stated at 
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/954-sd-c...rformance/

To overcome the max 23MB/s  interface to the block device (the sd-card) of the Pine64, which I expect to have an impact on the overall performance as IO often seems the bottleneck, I have looked for alternatives

The Pine 64+ fastest interface seems to be Gigabit Internet, which yields a max about ~110 to 125MB/s. I have therefore run some tests wie nbd (network block device, see https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/02/nbd...art-guide/ )

after loading the module 

Code:

modprobe nbd

and installing nbd-client userspace tool I can attach to a block device hosted on another computer via

Code:

ndb-client <ip-of-other-computer> <port> /dev/nbd0

Doing a performance test comparison we get

Code:

htparm -t /dev/mmcblk0
/dev/mmcblk0:
Timing buffered disk reads 34MB in 3.01 seconds = 11.31 MB/sec

htparm -t /dev/nbd0
/dev/nbd0:
Timing buffered disk reads 314MB in 3.00 seconds = 104.62 MB/sec

which I hope will improve performance somewhat.
Does anybody know if the ethernet in the A64 is parallel, separate (sort of DMA), or will network access eat CPU cycles?