I've taught this course a long time ago. Envied the students for all the fun they had implementing the homeworks. Highly recommended for anybody interested in computer systems.
For the right combination of budget, application and team you can get a custom solution with much lower latency. Back in the days my team beat Solarflare hands down, but only for a single application. Don't remember the total number, but each additional 4 bytes of the payload added 5-7ns, IIRC.
Where have you read about the very early memories, like <1 year? There is a thing that puzzles me most of my life. When I was a teenager we had a family discussion about early memories. I have described several ones I've always assumed to be my earliest, but I've never knew what age they are related to. In one of them my cradle was involved and I was told by my mom that I was removed out of cradle at the age of 3 months.