PowerPC - Bigfoot Networks Killer NIC

[Trev]

Has anyone noticed that the Killer NIC is essentially a PowerPC-based accelerator on a PCI card? I was browsing around for open TCP/IP Offload Engine solutions, and this isn't really what I was looking for ... but with some (very) creative software hacking, who knows. Anyhow, it runs an embedded Linux kernel and uses a proprietary mechanism to communicate between Linux code running on the card and applications running on the host system.

EDIT: I'm not suggesting this card be used as an accelerator for PowerPC-based Amiga software. I just thought it would be of interest to those interested in single-board computers, TOE, etc.

Trev

[Tron2k2]

This can't possibly work-it can be had for about $255 on eBay, it is a currently made product, and not made in someone's basement!

Everyone knows that to be a real l33t Amiga CPU, it has to cost a thousand bucks and been made ten years ago with no longer made parts so it can't be duplicated!

Tongue is in cheek here, but I don't know, it seems like Elbox could give this a shot, since this was the plan for their PCI backplane in the first place.  Think of how great the networking would be!

[Trev]

Yeah. What they've done here, though, is likely put a TCP/IP stack in an FPGA and combined with a Freescale processor with all the necessary trimmings (USB, Ethernet, etc.). If the Linux bits are open enough, I could see it being used as the hardware behind a custom bsdsocket.library on PCI-equipped Amigas.

There are many, many off the shelf products, some expensive, some not, that could be used to speed up specific aspects of classic Amiga computing....