On Sun, 5 Jun 2005, Joanna Roman wrote:
--- Niek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 6/5/2005 5:22 AM +0200, Joanna Roman wrote:
I am just wondering how feasible it is to do AV hw acceleration in
general. Besides using faster CPU and faster memory, ASIC can't
really help. Can anybody shed some light ?
You answered your own question.
I am just throwing out this question hoping someone
might have some novel idea of accelerating AV in HW.
Does anybody have any idea how company like Sensory
Networks does HW acceleration then. I have real doubt
about the result. I wonder how much gain they can
achieve.
Disclaimer: I'm making all of this up.
The purpose of the "accelerator" isn't necessarily to make it go faster,
but rather to offload some work from the main CPU. (Otherwise, you
could just buy more CPUs and load-balance the work.) That way you save
the expensive part (the CPU) for stuff it's good at, and use the cheaper
part (the accelerator) for specialty work.
For the case of virus scanning, there is NO floating-point arithmetic
involved. So about half the transistors in your typical CPU are going
to waste. Now imagine if you could simply produce a P4 minus the
floating point units for half the cost, and get the same virus-scanning
speed. Now imagine cutting out the cost of the motherboard with all its
useless goodies like video and sound, and just having a raw interface to
the accelerator (and its local ram). Sounds like a good deal to me,
though obviously it'd require some serious effort to get the first
prototype to work.
Someone tell me if I got any of this anywhere close to being right. ;)
Damian Menscher
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