Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 17:19:47 -0700 From: Soren Kristensen <soren@soekris.com> To: Bsdguru@aol.com Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Status of encryption hardware support in FreeBSD Message-ID: <3B3A7823.337CA425@soekris.com> References: <107.1bc2228.2868aa7a@aol.com>
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Bsdguru@aol.com wrote: > > In a message dated 06/24/2001 2:53:32 PM Eastern Daylight Time, > soren@soekris.com writes: > > > And btw, hardware beats software anytime. The fastest PC processor right > > now is about the same speed as the slowest hardware. > > what are the numbers? Are you accounting for the overhead in accessing the > hardware? the impact of the stop-and-wait requirements for hardware > processing? What about bus availability in a heavily utilized router? You are > going to double the bus requirement. I'm not claiming any specific numbers, just that the chip I'm using, the lowest end hi/fn 7951, is said to be faster than your typical highend >1Ghz CPU doing 3-DES. > Most people take a rather trivial approach to such evaluations, and i suppose > im concerned about anyone who thinks that hardware is "always faster" than > software, because that argument is blatently wrong. a 33Mhz ASIC will not > always be faster than the host, particularly with transfer and setup > requirements. It has to be 3-5 times faster than the host just to break even. I'm only talking about this specific case of doing computing intensive encryption.... As a hardware designer, I'm very well aware of all the different bottlenecks. Regards, Soren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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