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Chipset Integrates Gigabit Ethernet, RAID, Firewall
EconolineCrush writes "Tech Report has a review of NVIDIA's latest Athlon 64 chipset, the nForce3 250Gb. The 250Gb is especially interesting because it's the first core logic chipset to integrate a Gigabit Ethernet MAC, hardware-accelerated firewall, and RAID across four Serial ATA and four "parallel" ATA devices. NVIDIA is even working with third party developers to help their software take advantage of the chipset's hardware firewall components. Looks like we've reached a point where chipsets will differentiate on features more than performance."
The big question is, will all this stuff, half of which I will never use, slow down my computer?
Now that motherboard chipsets for athlons don't use a memory controller (the 64 bit ones have em on the chip processor) is that why we're starting to see all this stuff integrated into the motherboard?
Photos.
I totally disagree with the statement "Looks like we've reached a point where chipsets will differentiate on features more than performance.", even so far as to say that this is a disturbing trend.
That is the exact same strategy that Microsoft uses in it's operating systems. Security, stability, and performance are the top features I look for in a motherboard, and actually steer clear of motherboards with too many features...
KISS says it all
Open Your Mind. Open Your Source.
I'm very happy with my nForce2 motherboard right now. It's a phenomenal chipset by a phenomenal company, IMO. It's goot to see someone leading in this kind of development. The question is, who/what will follow? Or will Nvidia's wonderful ideas be ignored by other major chip manufacturers and the like?
It sounds nice except for the firewall which strikes me as misplaced. I do not want firewall duty being handled by my new systems, I would much rather have it handled by a nice router or really outdated system in a closet.
vampirical
Do more firewalls make a more secure machine? There will be a firewall built into your chipset, your OS, your router...
I have a feeling it's got to do with pointless features more than anything else.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
But the Gigabit and RAID have been available in other earlier models.
because it's the first core logic chipset to integrate a Gigabit Ethernet MAC
What about Intel's 875 chipset? It supposedly has Communications Streaming Architecture that bypasses the PCI bottleneck to allow gigabit ethernet to go faster.
Intel 875P Info
But I'm no Intel fanboy. I'm happy that Nvidia's improving their Athlon 64 offering by providing something with REAL Hypertransport support, none of that half-speed stuff.
In the words of the immortal Id Software, SPOOOOGE!!!!!
This card has awesome features. I can't wait to get one and use it with DooM 3 when it's released.
From TFA:
> Although its throughput is impressive, the 250Gb does show higher CPU utilization in NTttcp. However, the chipset's throughput performance is easily worth a couple of extra CPU cycles.
I concur. With faster CPUs on the market, this might not mean much in the long run anyway. Cycles that can take the load off could be worth the performance risk, and I would love to see it run DooM 3 and a custom map from Headshot or ZTN. I bet it'll handle level design pretty well too, from the specs.
> However, the relative closeness of most of our benchmark scores isn't conclusive enough to declare the nForce3 250Gb a winner on performance alone. That's where the 250Gb's robust arsenal of integrated peripherals and excellent ForceWare software enters the picture.
Very true. The extras do matter, and I can't wait to hear the difference with the audio apps that go with this, for example. Is it me or are companies like Nvidia going the extra mile with all the features lately? This trend is impressive, rather than annoying to me... I don't see it like a cop-out... but like they seem to care more for the details, which is good.
So does this mark the end of an era where speeds are improved at least twofold with every release? I'd much rather see less money spent on researching and developing 'new features' and more money on performance -- the features are useless if the chipset cant run fast enough to support them!
...a Gigabit Ethernet MAC...
I've always wanted a Mac inside my PC! I can't wait to pick up my nVidia G5/ia64-based computer!
How will we be able to patch it?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Will any one from OSS support it? Because all there video drivers are Tainted module
Yeah - this is the first to implement ALL of those, but that it was the logical next step... Most boards these days have at least one (or two) of those 'premium' features... it wasn't too long before someone came along and consolidated 'em....
Maybe Sun is not the first but its a core part of their ideology. This link to OS News has a link and discussion about this.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
The security is only good if the user turns it on.. or doesn't turn it off as the case may be.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
RAID, which is a totally distinct system, has no business being there.
It would be better still if we could believe the design will be properly tested and validated to the point anyone could have confidence in it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
does it work with linux?
At last! Especially considering Gigabit LAN's potential to totally saturate the PCI bus, first graphics left, IDE, USB, AC97 and now Ethernet sits directly on the north bridge without being lodged on PCI... nearly every device has left what's the point of it ;) Or what's the point of PCI-Express now everything has been offloaded, kind of takes the pressure off a little bit.
But... Does it run linux?
:) I could actually have 8-12 in this machine and it be justified.
Cause if it's like the early nforce boards, I was much better off with Via's stuff.
Nvidia's great suff, but I just haven't been impressed with their provided drivers yet. Comparing several build ATI+VIA systems to Nvidia core systems, I have far less problems, hassles, and overall better performace out of the ATI+VIa ones.
Like take the Asus offerings. The A7NX's rocked, but the nforce eqivalent.. sure it had like extra nic's, and other goodies, just didn't hold pace with a clean linux kernel and 3 gig's of ram.
I switched the $150 nforce chipset board with a $60 Via, and ended up with a MUCH better high end workstation.
Of course, I guess not everyone needs 3 gigs of ram.
-=fshalor
here's an idea for high end digital SLRs: camera makers should make SLR bodies with user replaceable/upgradeable CCD/CMOS image sensors. A sensor module would contain the actual CCD/CMOS array along with an intergerated control chip that would provide the camera body with information about the sensor itself and the actual image data. The user can open up the camera as if he or she was loading traditional film in the back of a film camera and upgrade to a higher megapixel image sensor or switch between various sensor technologies(ie. CCD, CMOS). since professional digital cameras usually cost a whole lot of money(Canon 1Ds - $8000) and become obselete just as fast as computer equipment, this idea would give consumers and professionals ways to upgrade their camera's capabilities(i.e. to higher mega pixels) easially.
They couldn't fix my brakes, so they made my horn louder.
But wait! Where are the complete set of steak knives to come with it absolutely free?
This sig no verb.
It's an integrated hardware firewall. I RTFA'd and it seems pretty cool. It starts up along with your system, so you don't have to worry about malware infecting your system during the short period between booting your system and the operating system and necessary drivers loading up. It also has a software interface reminiscent of Smoothwall and has several security profiles available for those unfamiliar with firewall configurations, but there is also a command line interface. Combined with those nifty antivirus features in the new athlon 64 chips, you've got yourself a pretty secure box.
"NVIDIA is even letting third-party software developers take advantage of the nForce3 250Gb's dedicated firewall hardware."
It doesn't say that they've published the necessary APIs and/or documentation for taking advantage of this feature, only that they're "letting" people take advantage of it. Does this mean it will remain closed and non-free like the nForce ethernet driver on previous chipsets? While they do release a "tainted" Linux driver, they don't allow groups like the OpenBSD project access to the documentation in order to write their own driver.
All that hardware off-loading of processing from the CPU is not going to benefit everyone unless they freely provide documentation for using it.
Here's hoping they release the necessary documentation instead of hoarding it like Intel has done with their on-NIC IPsec off-loading.
Other than that, I really like the integrated firewall for two reasons:
1.) It starts before the OS would have the ability to start a firewall
2.) It (apparently?) works regardless of OS (that's a big question mark)
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
i look forward to seeing the documentation for these devices, so they can be fully supported by [insert any os besides windows].
oh wait, did you say nvidia? nevermind. buggy binary drivers, no support for advanced features, drm, and linux only (no bsd allowed).
I hope manufactures start to notice that a lot of people who buy the high end motherboards are the same people who are likely to use linux exclusively or at least dual boot. Initially, most of the popular serial ata chipsets included with motherboards, silicon image 3112 comes to mind, had lousy linux support particularly for the raid features. 2.6 has come a long way with ide raid support mostly due to developer's working to reverse engineer, but maybe just maybe manufactures will start to realize that linux support early on is a good and profitable business practice.
I think we reached that point long ago. The chipset performance difference is often less than 5%, and usually less than 2%. Are you going to notice that in day-to-day activities? Not likely. Chipset loyalties, features, past experiences, these are the things that matter. After 2 years of rock solid performance on my Nforce 1, I would have to be hard pressed to switch to Via if they had a performance difference. Plus Nvidia's drivers generally work, and they try to make drivers that work no matter what board you have, just like their graphics cards.
Not that I'm a die-hard Nvidia chipset fan. At the time I bought the board two years ago, however, only the Nforce board provided all the features I wanted at the budget I was shooting for. The integrated video isn't horribe either, unlike Intel's Extremely Nasty solution.
Differentiating on features more than performance? I thing the legions of Small Form Factor junkies kind of make the argument that that bridge was crossed quite a while ago. They settle for less performance, and practially all reviews of those boxen focus on the features, and less on performance.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Why is it so cool to have more features? It is just simple product differentiation. With the current chipsets all being practically the same now, for both intel and AMD (which is far supior ;), they need to make the products stand out. There really is no difference bettween an Asus and an Abit motherboard. Both have about the same features and performance. It is only natural that this would happen...
is it's ability to overclock. This is the first confirmed chipset with pci lock and agp lock.
NJ Local Music Scene
...fill out a from that comes in the box. The knives will be shipped with the kitchen sink.
Go into the bios and disable it, or flash the bios.
Do they still call it bios?
This looks pretty good for the network performance alone, plus the RAID controller is pretty nifty. If it works nicely under Linux (and nVidia's site appears to have drivers) it'll make a good chipset for a low end server. I like what I've seen of the new AMD stuff, particularly their new system design (Hypertransport etc) . Had a presentation from Sun recently on their coming Opteron lineup and that looks pretty sweet too (looks like IBM is offering them as well).
It looks like the chipset can more than hold its own, even with beta drivers.
d s/ nf3/n250/001.htm0 04q2/nforce3-250gb /index.x?pg=1
http://www.gamers-depot.com/hardware/motherboar
http://techreport.com/reviews/2
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Host firewalls are "A Good Thing(TM)". With the abundence of malware, trojans, and application attacks that are allowed to breeze through firewalls (because that's not what network firewalls were designed to block), having a host firewall is an asset, not a liability.
It's not like an on-chip firewall is going to slow down your box, and no one said you have to configure it to allow access to the rest of your network (like a gateway firewall), it's just an extra layer of protection that you can tailor much more specifically to that host's needs.
This doesn't mean you have to throw away your current firewall, this means you get more (and better) protection. In fact, features like this would be great for deployed application servers. Each DMZ host can be protected from the others even though they're on the same switch, and it doesn't require buying licenses and installing more software (like ZoneAlarm).
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
If you aren't looking to use the firewall, it looks like it's pretty easy to turn it off.
In the Forceware screenshot it shows a line labeled "Firewall Setup: Change firewall profiles including turning Firewall on/off." But, I guess if price was an issue, and you the firewall kept you from getting it, I could see that. Seems to me, this would be cheaper than a spare system in the closet. I guess you would have to test it with the firewall on/off to know if it was stealing your cycles, though.
The ForceWare software that comes with it looks semi-decent. I like how it has a built in statistics graph for the firewall, too.
And the really nice part? When/if you DO stick an even better card in the AGP slot, you can still use the onboard for a second monitor.
For quite some time now, all of the machines I've built for our office have used NForce2 IGP chipsets, for precisely those reasons. A board that costs $100 (or less), is rock-solid, has terrific driver support, stellar performance, sound, network, etc. makes my life very, very easy. In fact, $450 will put together a VERY nice system (sans monitor) based on them.
Plus, the fact that they'll play quite a few games (Q3, WarCraft III, Counter-Strike) incredibly well makes staying late very enjoyable....
As a matter of fact, I'm going to upgrade my machine at home in the next month or two, and chances are that I'll keep using the same boards!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
If it's as bad as the rest of nVidia's Linux support, it's nothing to be excited about. nVidia's drivers taught me why open source drivers are so important.
And they're "good" about Linux support. That just underscores why open drivers are a must.
Any home user doesn't need a hardware accelerated firewall. Windows XP comes with a simple firewall that handles this kind of stuff with ease. The only rules a home users needs are block every port, and maybe let a few through, nothing fancy. Additionally, this'll apply only to about 4 megabits of bandwidth at most, considering the speed of even the fastest broadband residential connections.
This may just be somehting that the people at compusa can read off the tag. "Integrated firewall firewall for increased security". Either that or another feature for power users to tick off. Possibly similar to how pentium ads talk about optimization for streaming internet video when any processor made after 1997 can stream anything on the net today.
Photos.
Nvidia has some serious talent that produce great graphics cards, & chipsets with audio/ethernet/integrated graphics.
The next logical step would be an Nvidia CPU, perhaps integrated with other technologies. Wishful thinking?
Why didn't they just include a processor core like PowerPC or ARM core? Might as well make a super duper all-in-one cpu on a chip.
> I am a morbidly obese (5'8", 415 lbs., 24 y.o.)
> blob, and have been very fat since birth.
Whether you have health insurance or not, you need to go to a doctor as soon as possible and find out what's going on. S/he will prbably do bloodwork on you, take that paperwork with you to at least two other doctors for a consultation. You've got to get a baseline set before you can attack the problem...and you need to figure out exactly what kind of condition your internal organs and chemistry are in.
Once you're baselined, and reasonably sure you aren't facing imminent health hazards, it's time to start the education process...how human biochemistry works, etc.
Next is a plan, and getting with it, and crawling back to it when you fail or backslide. You've got to forgive your failures and move forward from this point.
It may be that you need to see a psychologist or psychiatrist. Try to find someoe good--it's really tough. The university system hands out psychology degrees like toilet paper, to pretty much any dolt who can drool their way through four years of education.
Anyway, I've seen some people as large as you (three people) recover completely, so it can be done. Doing it alone can work, but you might need a coach to get you started. Either way, just keep getting up if you fall.
Probably with a firmware upgrade.
?Who controls the past now, controls the future.
Who controls the present now controls the past.?
Then I tried this mobo in linux. SuSE did a normal install fine. As soon as I installed video and motherboard drivers, the whole OS was FUBAR. Pretty much the same thing in Red Hat... except I sorta got most of it usable (sound is still iffy).
Don't know about NForce3, but my NForce2 chipset board works great under Linux (Shuttle NForce2 Ultra 400; 2GB DDR400). There are even official drivers if you want (I use a PCI Gigabit nic, and ALSA includes support for the audio - so I don't use the drivers).
Great strides have been made since the first NForce.
I'd be greatful if somebody could just tell me what the difference between an extended and primary partition is.
Please don't repost from the SomethingAwful forums. kthnx
The firewall most likely acts as a co-processor, similar to the cryptographic co-processors found in some 3Com cards. I doubt any serious vulnerabilities are present if it's implemented right.
Notice that the article mentions the possibility of 3rd party developers using the hardware component -- perhaps iptables can utilize it as well.
If they ditched the parallel ata, they could save a ton of pins. People couldn't reuse their old drives, but using those pins for other features would be better.
I would like to see gigabit ethernet integrated onto the AMD64 cpu. That way my blades won't even need a chipset.
You're kidding about the XP firewall, right? In the version that ships with vanilla XP and SP1, calling it worthless would probably be an understatement. You're the first person I've heard that takes it anywhere near seriously.
That said, SP2 will ship with a much improved firewall that could be called a Zone Alarm lite, but honestly, my preference is still for a hardware level firewall. The reason for this is you're stopping the traffic before it ever touches the system, helping to stop a vulnerability in software from turning into a break-in of the actual system.
what is coming next week. NV40 geforce 6800. time to own that company called ati.
I am actually kinda suprised that nobody has mentioned it, including the poster.
meep
This is good stuff, people! Really!
Once we get past the "dumb beast" stage, the stage at which we believe bigger-is-better (in this field, more MHz), we reach a point where quality and smart features that are useful in today's world are what differentiates products. I've wished the market supported proper chipsatz (I just like how it sounds in German say it, so shoot me) development for a long time, now this news seems like bringing that a step closer to reality. It's a known fact that Intel, when they were interested in doing so, produced kick-ass chipsets. BX440 ring a bell?
These are smart features. Features that a lot of people will make good use of. But make no mistake - these are not marketing gimmicks (at least generally speaking) - these are not your useless AMR slots of yesteryear!
We are paying a lot of money for diminishing-return upgrades until these feature trends start being implemented. The fact that your computer calculates an Excel formula in 1/100th of a second faster than mine is not worth anything in reality, yet people are wasting good money on perceived upgrades. Yes, it's very nice that you get 1000 fps in your FPS of choice. using a Radeon 9800 Pro. My older now-$50 card gets 200 fps, which is fine for me. In fact, my monitor can't even display it that fast, and your LCD sure as heck can't! What I really want is to get rid of that firewall sitting next to my machine, with it's brick-style power adapter (anyone listening? get rid of those things!). What I really want is SATA RAID-5. Or thereabouts. It makes sense. We're ready for it. It's just a matter of time till someone steps in and delivers it. No more BS!
No more BS, no more RAMBUSsing, no more HyperBS-ing, no more FXing, no more Presscotting! Just do it, do it well, do it right! We'll buy it! We're buying your crap now, you can only profit by doing something smart and giving us what we really want.
P.S. Hat's off to nVidia for the nForce2, I hope the nForce3 250Gb is equally good in it's market. Although I'd change the name.
Must-not-watch TV!
For now, untill TCP takes hold. I think only pheonix has that now however. Dont buy pheonix.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I once found on Canon's website a manual on how to clean an digital SLR sensor.
Basically a digital SLR is a body+electronics+sensor and you can screw on your own lens. Note that while professional camera bodies are expensive, good lenses are also very expensive, so it makes sense to keep your lenses when you change body to a new camera. And, of course, if you are going to change the sensor you need to change the electronics too - which leaves the metal case which is not that expensive (look at regular film SLRs - they go for around $150-300 nowadays).
Now back to cleaning: the manual said something like this:
What happens is that the CMOS sensor is bare and anything harsher will likely damage it. So you really want it sealed - which implies having something transparent (like a lens ;) in front of it that you can't remove.
Good lens are expensive so you can just as well make it a part of the lens system to reduce the price.
Apple core logic chipsets had Gigabit ethernet for some time now (several years) and the K2 chipset found in the G5s also provide SATA.
Oops. forgot Slashdot mods don't watch Family Guy or Simpsons...
"It'll be a steal *winks*"
"Could you say that without winking?"
"It'll be a steal.... wink"
MS and Phoenix are planning to incorporate several features including TCP/IP in the BIOS. With the prospect of an onboard firewall, nVidia may very well be both ahead of its time and an (un)intentional partner with MS and Phoenix.
The article mentioned a couple networking things, beside the firewall, which are very cool..
- Gig-E on the chipset. Most NIC's attach via the PCI bus. Even the integrated NIC's on the motherboard, they connect via the PCI bus. Since a standard 32bit/33MHz bus tops out at 1Gbps, you've got a bottleneck if you want to do anything else - like access the disk. They bypass that, and give it direct access to the system bus. Their performance results are impressive.
- The article claims that it supports "TCP and checksum offload". TCP offload to hardware has been talked about in high performance network services (iSCSI, SSL accelerators, SANs) for a couple years, but doing this in a PC is a big leap. It can have a huge benefit in CPU performance.
- Of course, the firewall in hardware is interesting. I'm curious to see how flexible it is, but to be able to do firewalling and TCP in hardware shows how much network intelligence they put into the chipset. A hardware firewall can have some benefits in DoS attacks. The system doesn't need to see the packets, service interrupts, etc.. the packets are dropped before they hit the OS (depending on how the firewall was implemented).
The big question for me is: How open will the spec's be for these developments? Even though they are done in hardware, they will rely heavily on software for setup and full functionality. Without open spec's we won't be able to take advantage of these things in Linux.
dumb ass...
"The A7NX's rocked, but the nforce eqivalent"
What? Isn't the A7NX line all based on nforce?
Is it feasible to have iptables run in hardware? I mean, if NVIDIA say they're going to help third parties set up their software to use the hardware, they had better help the only firewall software we care about.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
> Like take the Asus offerings. The A7NX's rocked, but the nforce eqivalent..
There's is no motherboard that I'm aware of called the A7NX. Asus does make the A7N8X, which is generally considered one of the better motherboards available, supports 3 gigs of ram, and is based on the NForce2 chipset.
The N in the product number reveals that it uses an NVidia chipset. If it was a Via board, it would have a V instead of the N.
(I personally own an A7N8X and love it. I haven't had much luck with Linux on it, but that's my failing, not the board's.)
Stupid like a fox!
Maybe A7Nx as in A7N*. Just a guess at what the poster was thinking.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
unless it has open source
drivers. Without good
support for GNU/linux AND
BSD, it's not much better
than a doorstop. I am
tired of pissing away good
money on vendors' hardware,
when they only furnish lame
binary drivers that break
with a new kernel, or a
new improved X11. Best support
for Microsoft? FSCK 'EM.
How this isn't marked as flamebait I'll never know. Nvidia is known around linux circles for having the best 3d drivers, bar none.
Have you tried to play Americas Army with the open source, or closed source ati drivers?
The mods on slashdot never cease to amaze me.
anecdotal evidence reigns surpreme on slashdot.
My Nforce 2 runs great under 2.6, but I had some problems under 2.4 when it first came out. Considering the popularity of Nvidia and the fact that the company does release drivers I am sure that it will eventually be supported, but I will probably wait for six months or so after the chipset has been released before I would risk it. After all, I really don't plan on going to Gigabit ethernet in the house until the switches drop to the under $60 price range and while SATA hardware RAID 0,1 would be nice, I can do the same thing in software with linux. I definetly plan on going AMD64 on my next system, but I will probably get VIA based system initially.
If one chip breaks, the whole machine is useless! That's exactly what I want in a computer.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I work at NVIDIA and the firewall isn't really hardware accelerated. That is just a bunch of hype. There is some software (firmware) running on the motherboard on a dedicated processor. If you want to consider that hardware accelerated, then fine.
But that processor is pretty slow and it just runs a modified linux kernel for the firewall. I wouldn't really call that hardware accelerated, but it is better than having the CPU run the firewall code, I suppose.
I won't trust them. This just seems to be a long-term move to integrate a lot of stuff into hardware, including the trusted computing stuff, and try to convince us it is all for security.
From my experiance one's useally able to turn off all the unused motherboard crap in the BIOS.
Ever heard of the BIOS?
From my experiance most say to turn it off.
For example neither Telstra or Optus cable broadband will work with it enabled. Well that is unless both have upgraded their cable systems over the last 6 months, or MS has since patched out that problem.
Actually I think he's talking about the motherboard's embedded firewall, not the bloody MS one.
Not MS's Window XP default firewall.
Apparently the board's firewall is based on a modified Linux kernal in the firmware that boot's a embedded processor before the bios finishes loading & WinXP's bootloader start's running.
Remember PC Chips motherboards (like their Super 7 boards with double the L2 cache of just about everyone else), they had a reputation of high returns (hence they mostly now trade under another name, ECS), well they sold a number of Socket 7, Super 7, Slot 1 & Socket 370 boards with embedded Video cards.
The Videochip gave the appearance of a extra Northbridge, complete with a tiny heatsink just like a Northbridge heatsink, while they useally had 2 Video RAM chips on the board that looked just like cache chips on earlier boards. As FSB speeds increased to the 100mhz to 133mhz level they eventually stopped adding the 2 embedded video RAM chips & started to tax the main memory instead.
It was a 686 chip with embedded logic chipset (memory controller, Floppy/IDE controllers, Serial/parrallel/PS2, etc, etc), video chipset & Audio. The concept was to make really super cheap Pentium clone systems as nothing would be need on the motherboard but a propietry CPU socket, a RAM slot, the drive connectors, the backplane connectors & the BIOS flashchip.
Only problem, Cyrix (& then National Semi, which bought Cyrix) were having even more trouble ramping these babies up to speed than their MIIs (basically just a 686 on a smaller process core with MMX added), by which time they weren't competetive with contemporaneous desktop chip releases anyway.
Well National Semi ended up selling Cyrix to VIA, but they kept the MediaGX for themselves, as it complimented their embedded chips business & the 'Cyrix MediaGX' became known as the 'National Semiconductor GeodeX86'. It then formed a family within National Semi's embedded line & there was a push for it in the Network/Web Appliance scene. National Semi even started a new dept that developed it's own family of Network/Web Appliances for it, for 3rd party developers to market.
Well guess what, about 6 months ago AMD purchased the Geode & the National Semi Information Appliance (IA) unit, taking it's 120 odd employees with it.
The average home user just needs to make sure their ports are blocked. No it's not a 'good' firewall, but it's massive improvement over none.
Photos.
This feature set seems pretty similar to Intel's 875 chipset from LAST YEAR. Including Gigabit ethernet in the north bridge and integrated serial ATA raid on the southbridge.
So this one has 4 ports... that's not so amazing. The only thing on this that's notably different is the "hardware accelerated firewall." I'm not sure if there is such a thing anymore, but I'm going to guess that any CPU you put in that thing will be able to handle firewall functionality with less than 1% of its power.
Not impressive unless you must have Athlon support.
The Intel i875 does NOT include Gigabit ethernet in the north bridge (aka Memory Communications Hub, or MCH). What it has is a separate bus (CSA or Communication Streaming Architecture) that is designed to directly connect to a discrete gigabit ethernet controller. To the best of my knowledge, Intel is the only company producing those disctere CSA ethernet chips.
The only new thing about the RAID support is that this works with both SATA and Parallel ATAI drives together. Previous solutions could only use either SATA or parallel ATA in any given array. Not a huge advance, but a nice little extra.
They exist. Check out the Mamiya 645AF-D. Available 6, 11 and 22MP backs, plus 220 and 120 Film backs.
Of course, these are Medium Format SLR's, not 35mm. Hasselblad offers something similar in their 645 line.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Otherwise I'd give you a bump.
Sorry.
I ran a KT7-Raid mobo for 8 months or so with debian, then pulled it out to give to my sister. Tried to install windows --- lockup.
Tried again (Windows XP Pro).
Again (Windows XP Home)
Again (Windows 2000 Pro)
Again (Windows 98).
All locked up during install or shortly thereafter.
Turned around, installed Debian. Rock Solid, ran all night.
I threw up my hands and figured that the mobo just "Doesn't Do Windows". Must be in the habit of running linux.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Did you have the KT7 or the KT7A? That makes a big difference I found. I've been running a KT7A-RAID on my server (Win2K Advanced Server with dual mirrored drives) for over a year and other than one hard drive failure it hasn't crashed once. The original KT7 had some problems, though, and while the SoftMenu III BIOS is really powerful it does give you enough rope to hang yourself with, particularly with memory timing and interleave modes. Properly configured the KT7A is pretty solid.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Woo woo! Here comes the clue train! It's called by some...
BIOS FLASHING!
Since Windows is part of the problem, then part of the fix is installing another O/S that can be *secured* better.
"Without good support for GNU/linux AND BSD, it's not much better than a doorstop."
Riiiight. If you're gonna use it for something it's not suited for, then you really are wasting your money. And our air, if you're really that dumb.