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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.
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...?
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.