Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:19:45 -0500 From: Steve Ames <steve@virtual-voodoo.com> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: Soren Kristensen <soren@soekris.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Status of encryption hardware support in FreeBSD Message-ID: <20010627221945.B92559@virtual-voodoo.com> In-Reply-To: <15162.39875.353224.757884@guru.mired.org>; from mwm@mired.org on Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 09:51:47PM -0500 References: <107.1bc2228.2868aa7a@aol.com> <3B3A7823.337CA425@soekris.com> <15162.39875.353224.757884@guru.mired.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 09:51:47PM -0500, Mike Meyer wrote: > 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. Can't you also make the assumption that hardware vendors will be upgrading their product with equal vigor? Supporting hardware now (when its faster than CPU) will make it much easier to support it later (when its still faster than CPU). -Steve To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20010627221945.B92559>