From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Jun 27 20:20: 0 2001
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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
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References: <107.1bc2228.2868aa7a@aol.com> <3B3A7823.337CA425@soekris.com> <15162.39875.353224.757884@guru.mired.org>
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In-Reply-To: <15162.39875.353224.757884@guru.mired.org>; from mwm@mired.org on Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 09:51:47PM -0500
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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

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