From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jun 27 19:51:51 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-27-141-144.mmcable.com [24.27.141.144]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4C37137B401 for ; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 19:51:48 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 11070 invoked by uid 100); 28 Jun 2001 02:51:47 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15162.39875.353224.757884@guru.mired.org> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:51:47 -0500 To: Soren Kristensen Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Status of encryption hardware support in FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <3B3A7823.337CA425@soekris.com> References: <107.1bc2228.2868aa7a@aol.com> <3B3A7823.337CA425@soekris.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Soren Kristensen types: > 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. [ ... ] > 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. The crucial bottleneck for this kind of thing is the doubling time. Unless your special purpose hardware doubles in speed as fast or faster than general purpose CPUs, then eventually it's going to be slow, then expensive, and finally dead. Given the two doubling times and current relative speed, you can easily predict when general purpose CPUs well be faster and then when they will be more cost effective. At that point, your special purpose hardware is dead, and just waiting for the rest of the world to realize it. Given the predicted lifetime, you can make a rational decision about whether it's worth the effort to support the hardware. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message