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USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps

Posted by kdawson on from the talking-in-your-sleep dept.

jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It's a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the "Somniloquy" device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).

8 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. 50x less? by Enry · · Score: 4, Informative

    Argh!

    It's one of the following:

    1/50 the power usage

    or

    a standard PC uses 50x the power of this NIC

  2. KillerNIC? by bstreiff · · Score: 4, Informative

    Isn't this somewhat akin to what the much-hyped KillerNIC was all about-- a separate device to offload network activity (for example, BitTorrent downloads)?

    1. Re:KillerNIC? by Vu1turEMaN · · Score: 3, Informative

      No. Not at all.

  3. Re:Perfect for the computer lab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If it had Wifi, you could just stick it to the bottom of a table at your favorite coffee shop.

    RTFA

    Pulled directly from the link:

    The resulting device, pictured above, includes a 200MHz Marvell PXA255 processor with 64MB of RAM and 16MB of flash storage, 10/100 Ethernet, WiFi, and an SD slot which was fitted with a 2GB memory card.

  4. There's another name for such a device by jdb2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's called the "Killer NIC". It's a PCI Express network card which offloads network packet processing to a custom embedded Linux distro running on a 400MHz ARM processor with 256MB of RAM, and oh, it works with Vista. As it's independent of the main CPU, it can run applications, such as a bittorrent client, while the main CPU attends to other tasks while still acting as a NIC for the main CPU even if one of the on-board applications is also network oriented -- they call this "Flexible Network Architecture" or "FNA apps." Oh, and did I mention that it has a USB port for storage of such applications and any associated data ( such as files downloaded via Bittorent ) on a USB flash drive?

    Another "great innovation" from Microsoft.

    jdb2

  5. Re:Perfect for the computer lab by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Informative

    If it had Wifi, you could just stick it to the bottom of a table at your favorite coffee shop.

    You might need to build a dumb USB power supply for it though. How about a 9 volt battery, a resistor and a zener diode?

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  6. Re:Perfect for the computer lab by colsandurz45 · · Score: 5, Informative

    You might need to build a dumb USB power supply for it though. How about a 9 volt battery, a resistor and a zener diode?

    How about that's extremely inefficient. For an additional $0.50 you can get a voltage regular or DC-DC converter. Come on, I'm on the digital side of EE and I know better.

  7. Re:Perfect for the computer lab by Pentium100 · · Score: 4, Informative

    2GB memory card - not nearly big enough. My torrent PC has 320GB hard drive which sometimes is too small.

    A nice idea though. Now add a IDE or SATA port to it and make it autonomous, well, like a PC with the torrent software, so that I can:

    1.set up the network, load the .torrent files, disconnect it from my PC, connect it to a battery and leave it somewhere to download. The ability to change MAC address would be useful.
    2.If it is used as a network card - the small CPU should still work and download files so that if the host PC freezes or has a BSOD the downloads continue.