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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."
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.
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not want firewall duty being handled by my new systems, I would much rather have it handled by a nice router or really outdated system in a closet.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
Will any one from OSS support it? Because all there video drivers are Tainted module
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.
"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!
> The big question is, will all this stuff, half of which I will never use, slow down my computer?
No, if anything it will be arguably faster than traditional north/south-bridge pairs.
The unofficial
Oh come on, its nothing like what Microsoft does. Microsoft uses underhanded tactics to search and destroy any company that they think they can take over and profit from. These guys added a logical feature (a firewall), and made a logical progression (from 100base to gigabit ethernet).
You say security is what you look for in a motherboard - how is this motherboard, with a well designed, built in, hardware level firewall, any less secure than any other motherboard that is the same except for the firewall. Or are you complaining about the SATA? Motherboards with SATA should be banned, and we should all still stick with ATA alone? Or maybe its the onboard RAID? Or is 100base onboard ethernet somehow better than GB?
The more I think about it, the more I realize that I shouldn't respond to this at all, but should have given you a -1:Flamebait. I mean if " Security, stability, and performance are the top features I look for in a motherboard", then RTFA and notice that performance is ahead of its class, and its very stable, not to mention the extra steps taken for security. Hopefully some mods will take care of this.
is it's ability to overclock. This is the first confirmed chipset with pci lock and agp lock.
NJ Local Music Scene
No. Think of it as a co-processor.
A hardware firewall implementation is intended to allow firewall software to process data at a much faster rate. Higher packet matching and filtering rates and less load on the CPU itself.
There are several such co-processing units available for encryption already. Just because you install a security co-processor doesn't mean your system is secure.
With Gigabit networks, it is very handy to be able to offload functions like packet matching to a chip other than the main processor. Even a with a very fast main processor, you will notice a severe system load with a complex firewall ruleset and a traffic load that can theoretically hit 120MB/s.
This is one of the reasons that ultra-high end routers and firewalls are so much more efficient at handing large traffic loads... they have processors specifically designed and dedicated to processing Ethernet/IP/whatever traffic.
My real question is how open is the spec? I would love to see security co-processor support in the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is still lagging behind Free/OpenBSD in that it will not make use of crypto cards.