Hot Hardware's Review of Bigfoot Network's
Killer NIC
By now, we're all familiar with Creative Lab's Audigy and X-Fi audio processors. A startup known as AISeek is working on an Artificial Intelligence accelerator for the PC. Ageia's PhysX processor is already on store shelves, and the product we'll be looking at today, the Killer NIC, is designed to offload some network functions from the CPU. Bigfoot Networks' Killer NIC is more than just a beefed up network card though. In fact, the Killer is more of a "system on a card" than a NIC. The company claims their product can improve ping times and frame-rates in many on-line games, and it's unique design opens up the possibility of running dedicated network apps with the help of its on-board processor and RAM. Take a look...
The Killer NIC does not have a typical network controller on-board that sends a majority of the network processing to the host CPU. Instead, the card is equipped with a Freescale MPC8347E communications processor, a Xilinx Spartan FPGA, a Broadcom GigE PHY, 64MB of RAM, an embedded Linux distro and USB controller / port. The 400MHz Freescale processor used is part of the company's PowerQUICC II Pro family, which is designed for a multitude of communications applications like ethernet routers, switches, wireless LAN (WLAN) equipment, network storage, and network appliances, among others. The Xilinx Spartan FPGA is a low-cost, programmable gate array that contains Bigfoot Networks' proprietary technology. At this point, there are no plans for a custom ASIC. The 64MB of RAM on the card works in conjunction with the processor and FPGA for caching and for running specialized applications, dubbed "FNApps". FNApps can be executed by the card's processor, and can read and write data to a flash drive or external HD connected to the card's USB port.
