From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jun 27 20: 5:38 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from server.soekris.com (soekris.com [216.15.61.44]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1475737B401 for ; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 20:05:34 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from soren@soekris.com) Received: from soekris.com (soren.soekris.com [192.168.1.4]) by server.soekris.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id UAA63174; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 20:05:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from soren@soekris.com) Message-ID: <3B3A9EFA.E65C2DC8@soekris.com> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 20:05:30 -0700 From: Soren Kristensen Organization: Soekris Engineering X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.75 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mike Meyer Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Status of encryption hardware support in FreeBSD References: <107.1bc2228.2868aa7a@aol.com> <3B3A7823.337CA425@soekris.com> <15162.39875.353224.757884@guru.mired.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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 Hi, That's not really the point here, I was talking about lowest end hardware compared to high end CPU. If we compare with high end hardware, then we're talking about factor >50 faster than software.... There are chips out that can do >1Gbit 3-DES, given a 64bit/66Mhz PCI bus. I'm just starting with a low end chip to complement my 133 Mhz 486 based net4501 board, with the goal of low cost and low power, not absolute performance. Soren Mike Meyer wrote: > > 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. > > -- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message