-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, Michael O'Donnell hath spake thusly: > these days the boundary between the two is blurrier > than ever) but in commodity systems I assume you'd > agree that modems, NICs, SCSI adapters, etc are all > examples where the corresponding SW solution would > more or less have to suck by comparison...
Would you agree that this is not necessarily the case, if you can add a general-purpose CPU that the OS can allocate to that task, and doing so could have no marginal cost? IOW, in a way, when you add one of these devices to your system, isn't this more or less what you're doing? IOW, with the speed of CPUs today, does a hardware-specific chip really have any practical functional benefit (ignoring cost, which is not a functional benefit) over a more generalized one, for any of these applications? In some cases, it's cheaper to add a CPU to your system, than it is to buy say, a hardware modem (depending on the models of each that you chose, of course). But the modem isn't likely to overburden your second CPU, and it'll probably have plenty of extra cycles to spend on other tasks. For roughly the same amount of money (remembering that you've got to buy the equivalent of a winmodem too), I think you actually get more benefit out of using the more generalized hardware, since you can use unused cycles for other purposes... So I guess I'm saying no, I don't necessarily agree. Bear in mind, I acknowledge that in either case, you still have to add hardware to your system for the solution not to suck by comparison. But I think that doesn't diminish Ben's point, which I interpreted to be that specialized hardware isn't necessarily inherently better than the same task implemented in software on generalized hardware. - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - --------------------------------------------- I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9Ge75djdlQoHP510RApUYAJ4pU4xOJwTqLdcgs500xK47+lXRdwCePems ziLXOUyyLmMsAq4cYfqPNnk= =PMsU -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
