On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Burn Alting wrote: > Last year, there were discussions on this list about the possible > use of a 'co-processor' (Intel's IOP333) to compute raid 5/6's > parity data. > > We are about to see low cost, multi core cpu chips with very > high speed memory bandwidth. In light of this, is there any > effective benefit to such devices as the IOP333? > > Or in other words, is a cheaper (power, heat, etc) cpu with > higher memory access speeds, more cost effective than a > bridge/bus device (ie hardware) solution (which typically > has much lower memory access speeds)? Something else to ponder: Is it worth it in terms of extra hardware complexity, and additional software to drive it vs. the marginal increase in speed it might give, when 99.9% of the time you are going to be waiting on the external disk reading or writing the data compared to the time it takes to generate the parity? Personally, I'd opt for hardware simplicity over a marginal speed increase anyday... However with todays energy prices on the increase, then it might be something to consider, if it was going to give a significn power savings, even so I'm not sure... Gordon - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
