On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 07:35:35PM -0400, Craig Partridge scribbled: | In message <Pine.BSF.4.21.0104101753540.98098-100000@overlord.e-gerbil.net>, "R | >Don't be absurd, I can walk into fry's and pick up a motherboard with | >64bit/66mhz PCI, some Netgear GA620's, and all the other components for a | >1GHz computer for under $1000. | | OK, so your bus has 4.2 Gb/s of bandwidth. But, alas, you're in a PC | so you have to copy each packet from the line card, into main memory, | examine it, and push it back out to a line card. So each packet consumes | twice its size in bus bandwidth. So 2 1 Gb/s line cards will consume | 4 Gb/s backplane. Assuming you can run the PCI at full rate (which in | my experience is a big big if), you can connect two Ethernets. I don't think you have to use X86. Take a look at other platforms. :) For example, Alpha, UltraSparc, or PowerPC. -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | keichii@iteration.net | keichii@freebsd.org | | http://iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +-----------------------------------------------------------+