On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, at 12:42pm, Derek D. Martin wrote: > 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?
Yes. Resource contention. A card that offloads tasks to the CPU has to contend for said CPU along with memory, bus, and other resources. If a time critical event happens when the system is busy, the event is lost. This is why, even in a host system with an extremely fast clock rate and gobs of memory, so-called "Winmodems" still suck. A modem does not require a huge amount of processor power to do what it does, but it *must* be able to do it when the signal comes in from the analog-to-digital converter. If the system is busy doing something else, you lose. In fact, in high-end systems, you will see even more tasks offloaded to secondary processors, because it is easier and cheaper to do that then it is to make the core system faster. Hence things like hardware RAID controllers, "smart" serial controllers, and network cards with built-in encryption ASICs. > 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. My point was not so much that, but rather, that everything has an implementation cost, whether implemented in hardware or software. Implementing something in hardware does not magically make that cost go away. And, I guess I should add, implementing something in software is not automatically a good idea, either. :-) -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
