thus Elliot Mackenzie spake: > <snip> > >> Of course it can, for example by using a single process environment, >> with synchronous CPU/fast RAM to maximize banwidth, and hardware >> related signature matching. >> It's the same for 3D video cards : floating point calculations for 3D >> rendering can be made by the CPU. But with dedicated hardware, it's >> multiple times faster. >> >> >> > On an ASIC you could certainly get higher performance by designing > hardware to run only your pattern matching algorithm, but the biggest > problem you will have with dedicated hardware is the cost effectiveness > of your end product. Unless you plan to sell thousands of these, it's > probably going to be more cost effective just to run up a dedicated > linux box and renice the service to -10 or so: and it would certainly be > easier to deploy. > M.
IMHO there are quite a few other things to mention... first of all it depends on the scale you plan to deploy such a product yourself or the size of the market you expect the product can take. thus one has to pay attention to achive a nice design which generates not high costs (but please don't fight that 'as-cheap-as-possible' thing -- that'll end in a catastrophe here but is beyond the scope of this list, i think). furthermore it's a ecological *and* economical thing: for a large ISP, deploying two medium Suns (e.g.) with each four AV accels is much better than having hundrets of mediocre performing GNU/L*nux (or any other) boxens standing around which demand lots of space, generate a lot of heat and administration demands, etc. as always, YMMV. a small ISP may want to build a dedicated ClamAV machine which gets things to be scanned handed over, a large(r) ISP may draw a different picture. cheers, -- Timo Schoeler | http://macfinity.net/~tis | [EMAIL PROTECTED] //macfinity -- finest IT services | http://macfinity.net Key fingerprint = F844 51BE C22C F6BD 1196 90B2 EF68 C851 6E12 2D8A There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't. _______________________________________________ http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html
