Network Adapter Keeps Talking While a PC Is Asleep 188
Al writes "Researchers at Microsoft and the University of California, San Diego have developed a network adapter that lets a computer enter sleep mode without disrupting the network connection. The adapter, dubbed Somniloquy (meaning to talk in one's sleep), consists of a gumstix running embedded Linux, 64MB of RAM and a 2G SD memory card, connected via USB. The adapter keeps the network connection going and the researchers have also developed a simplified IM client and bittorrent client that carry out more complicated tasks autonomously, only waking the computer if, for example, an actualy IM is received or a download is completed."
Mainframe architecture revisted ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember when your IBM mainframe had an array of special I/O processors? Well, the bus arbitrator on your motherboard looks suspiciously like one of those. And remember when disk arrays because "smart"? Well ... just looks at the electronics on the average SATA IDE drive and you'll see what I mean. It manages the hardware, and you only talk to the drive's on-board controller, never to the drive itself.
And now this network controller. Pardon me, I mean network card.
Research? This is already a product (Score:2, Interesting)
NIC's with on board processors and off load for these types of applications have been on the market for several years.
http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/products/ [bigfootnetworks.com]
I think the only difference here is the operation while sleeping which could easily be done with a killer nic with firmware/driver changes
Is it just me? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yo Dawg (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So in other words... (Score:3, Interesting)
LoB
Re:So in other words... (Score:1, Interesting)
so, every 10 minutes with a decent connection. maybe the 2GB is upgradable.