Killer xTend, SmartByte and MultiGig tech announced

[HEXUS]

Killer xTend makes your PC system into a network switch and a Wi-Fi extender.

Read more.

[directhex]

802.1ax?

[Kushan]

Does the motherboard need to be powered on to act as the switch? If so, it's a bit of a deal breaker.

[aidanjt]

Does the motherboard need to be powered on to act as the switch? If so, it's a bit of a deal breaker.

It would have to be, there's no way to packet switch between ethernet and wifi adapters without the CPU getting involved. I can see where it can be useful for heavy duty home media servers or some such that'll be running anyway.

[Kushan]

It would have to be, there's no way to packet switch between ethernet and wifi adapters without the CPU getting involved. I can see where it can be useful for heavy duty home media servers or some such that'll be running anyway.

Well I was talking about the switching of multiple Ethernet ports, but all the same - if it's their own hardware bolted onto the motherboard, it could theoretically work without the CPU getting involved.

I don't think it is though, AFAIK Killer take off the shelf components and shove their own firmware on it.

I still don't see the point, the motherboards this stuff is aimed to be on is clearly high-end gaming machines.

[aidanjt]

I'm sure with this much networking hardware on a single motherboard they're going to be aiming at the HEDT market, something with a CPU that can handily cope with a multitude of roles.

[Kushan]

I don't disagree that the machine will be powerful enough to cope with it, what I am getting at is that I don't see the market for someone who's going to spend all that money on a machine then have it do all of the things.

Put it this way, how much power is such a machine going to draw while idle, compared to a simple switch? Even a switch + NAS for a media centre is going to be much more economical and practical than one of these.

[LSG501]

so a multiple port lan adapter, either 10Gb (still pretty expensive) or bridged networking and their 'branded' QOS software..... nothing really new and most of it's just branding and marketing really except that it's been stuck directly on a motherboard

[Firejack]

I remember having a AMD Athlon XP system with dual NICs and a NVIDIA nForce 2 chipset (yes, NVIDIA) that was running Firewall/ NAT for my home network. It was nice at first but nothing could be the convenience of having a separate router that was on 24/7 to manage/ protect you.
To me this seems like Killer is wasting its time and resources on something that was tried and never really gained widespread adoption.

[Iota]

Well I'm still waiting for this to be released, http://www.linksys.com/us/p/P-WRT32X/.

Perhaps Rivet Networks should get their stuff into routers first, that would be much more useful.