I'm just posting this here, since I've got no idea where in this forum this belongs.
I've just read an article on a KillerNIC, supposedly a PCI addon 10/100/1000 ethernet, fast ethernet card. It sports a 400mhz processor and 256mb PC2100 DDR RAM. According to their website, this product is aimed at gamers (read people-with-too-much-money-and-are-willing-to-splurge-on-nonessential-hardware-believeing-it-will-make-them-more-popular) interested in reducing their ping while playing games such as BF2 online. It will also help in increasing gaming FPS, since it offloads network processes on its 400mhz processor.
Now, this is what I have in mind. Is this the future of computing, where all the CPU is is a glorified calculator, set to calculate Pi to 1m digits? We started off with offloading graphic processing unto video cards, which is, and always will be, the best things in computing for gamers. Lately, we've got Ageia coming out with their PPU (Physics Processing Unit) card, which offloads some processing from the GPU. Network? Do we really need a 400mhz gigabit card?
Of course alot of people are sceptical about this, especially with the introduction of the PPU. Everything it does can be done by the graphics card, so why not leave it to the graphics card, instead of getting a new card, which costs money? If we had thought that way, we'd still be running 2D games on our CPU.
So is this the future? A computer where addon cards do all the work, and the CPU just crunch numbers? How about with graphics, will there be addon cards to specifically do the AA and AF? How far will it go?
Just posting randomly, but I'd love to hear ideas, and review this thread in 20 years time and see what has changed
I've just read an article on a KillerNIC, supposedly a PCI addon 10/100/1000 ethernet, fast ethernet card. It sports a 400mhz processor and 256mb PC2100 DDR RAM. According to their website, this product is aimed at gamers (read people-with-too-much-money-and-are-willing-to-splurge-on-nonessential-hardware-believeing-it-will-make-them-more-popular) interested in reducing their ping while playing games such as BF2 online. It will also help in increasing gaming FPS, since it offloads network processes on its 400mhz processor.
Now, this is what I have in mind. Is this the future of computing, where all the CPU is is a glorified calculator, set to calculate Pi to 1m digits? We started off with offloading graphic processing unto video cards, which is, and always will be, the best things in computing for gamers. Lately, we've got Ageia coming out with their PPU (Physics Processing Unit) card, which offloads some processing from the GPU. Network? Do we really need a 400mhz gigabit card?
Of course alot of people are sceptical about this, especially with the introduction of the PPU. Everything it does can be done by the graphics card, so why not leave it to the graphics card, instead of getting a new card, which costs money? If we had thought that way, we'd still be running 2D games on our CPU.
So is this the future? A computer where addon cards do all the work, and the CPU just crunch numbers? How about with graphics, will there be addon cards to specifically do the AA and AF? How far will it go?
Just posting randomly, but I'd love to hear ideas, and review this thread in 20 years time and see what has changed