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Killer NIC Hands-On Testing
basscomm writes "IGN has gotten their hands on the 'Killer' NIC recently mentioned here on Slashdot and have written a two part article detailing their impressions: 'The performance boost we got out of the Killer NIC in this testing exceeds Bigfoot Networks' own claims of 10-15% gains by a long shot and certainly seems to validate the potential of the technology. We suspect, however, that the fact that these computers were marginal at running F.E.A.R. in the first place had an impact in the comparison. In many cases the non-Killer NIC machine became absolutely bogged down as particles flew and grenades exploded, enough so that the entire machine would hang for a moment as things got sorted out. Obviously this murdered average fps figures.'"
Yes it runs Linux...
If you did a double take at the spec's of the Killer NIC's NPU you weren't alone. It's dramatically overkill for common networking processing that the card will encounter. That doesn't mean it's useless, however. Far from it, as a matter of fact. The Killer NIC is actually running an onboard Linux build that handles all its networking duties, and, best of all, is entirely accessible to the end user via console prompt or with what Bigfoot Networks is calling Flexible Network Applications (FNA).
Now, does it run *IN* Linux? Probably not.
This is a pretty cool concept - a self-contained VM in hardware to handle your whole networking stack.
It could have potential security benefits as well, in that it would likely be impossible to use say a buffer overflow exploit in a networking protocol with this card, because the overflow would occur *inside the VM*. All that would happen is your NIC would suddenly die - not *great*, but better than having your machine compromized. The host OS could probably even detect this lockup and 'reboot' the VM on the card.
It works (maybe)
Awright, color me ignorant but I'm not finding a whole lot of technical info on this so I'll ask the crowd:
How is this different than any other high-end NIC with onboard processor?
By this I am referring to the high-capacity NICs which have been made for the server market for many years by various companies. E.g. Intel has had a series of NICs for ages which have (if I recall correctly) an onboard i860 CPU, RAM etc and it's own little OS in firmware to offload the number crunching from the OS. (And a damn tiny set of drivers as well since all that code was on the board instead of the driver files).
As near as I can tell this is just like any other of these NICs only somebody slapped some pretty graphics and plastic doodads on it and tripled the price.
Or am I completely off base and this really is a quantum leap in areas other than marketing...?
Theres no way this could possibly make any difference in speed.
The test must be flawed. They should have used a seperate 3com nic or something not onboard.
Theres no way that there is a 65% performance gain becuase of the nic card. thats impossible.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Most people who game are plugged in behind a router, because they're sharing their internet connection. We know this decreases our ping, but what can we do? Well, if this card were itself a router, we might just have our answer! If it had a single LAN port, or maybe four (they'd fit), the gaming computer could be connected directly into the internet, with the rest of the home network behind it. Firewall and other network services could easily run from the on-card Linux. Really, it wouldn't need extra hardware apart from the ports themselves. Other software features could prioritize ping-sensitive packets like VoIP and game stuff, so that my roommate's bittorrent doesn't interfere with FEAR.
One disadvantage would be that the gaming computer would always need to be turned on for the router to do its job. Or maybe not: the card could have its own 12V plug and get its own power, so it stays on 24/7 even if the hosting computer is turned off. I expect this really could significantly improve ping numbers (vs standard NIC behind a router) plus it would be seriously cool.
Well, the result certainly is interesting, but I don't really trust their conclusion. If anything, they are showing what an onboard NIC tacked on for about $1.50 is really worth. I agree that it would be quite a bit more interesting to test the performance against a decent dedicated network card, many of which do quite a bit of offloading as it is.
It's also worthwhile to note that the card is bundled with F.E.A.R. and arguably biased towards it -- perhaps the game has code to better take advantage of the capabilities of the hardware or god forbid artifically cripple itself if not running with the hardware. It certainly wouldn't be the first time we've seen such a claim, with the PhysX drivers showing faster performance in software-only mode on very new, very fast cpu's despite a game generally refusing to run with the added physics settings without the hardware.
...for this:
"The Killer NIC also has its own USB 2.0 port, which expands its capabilities even more. A BitTorrent client designed for the NPU could run on the card and use an external USB hard drive for storage, which would make it invisible as far as Windows is concerned. Thanks to the Killer NIC's traffic prioritization capabilities, users will conceivably be able to play the most demanding games while using extra bandwidth for BitTorrent, without any performance hits due to BitTorrent CPU load or hard drive access."
Mmm...invisible bittorrent...