Modern NICs implement various features in hardware, such as protocol offloading, multicore supports, traffic control, and self virtualization. This approach exposes several issues: protocol dependence, limited hardware resources, and incomplete/buggy/non-compliant implementation. Even worse, the slow evolution of hardware NICs due to increasingly overwhelming design complexity cannot keep up in time with the new protocols and rapidly changing network architectures. We introduce the SoftNIC architecture to fill the gap between hardware capabilities and user demands. Our current SoftNIC prototype implements sophisticated NIC features on a few dedicated processor cores, while assuming only streamlined functionalities in hardware. The preliminary evaluation results show that most NIC features can be implemented in software with minimum performance cost, while the flexibility of software provides further potential benefits.