Bandwidth doesn't get to be adequate until you hit 100-base-T (which delivers 10MBps burst rate). But, supposing it did, it's not future-proof, because you can't just upgrade hardware and expect it to work at 500Mbps. That's the nice thing about a GPIB-based backplane -- if you upgrade the peripherals, and the backplane itself can handle it, you get the rate increase for free.

The other problem I have with Ethernet is that, with my experience so far, they're stupifyingly difficult to write software for. I don't know why this is -- Ethernet should be drop-dead simple to code for: set up a DMA buffer, enable it, and wait for packets. On interrupt, query the buffer, and do your thing. Polled I/O should be simpler. Yet, my attempts to code an NE2000 driver, arguably the simplest of all possible Ethernet interfaces, in the past have been met with nothing but fail.

I get what your saying, but consider the latest generations of CPU's compared to GPUs.

Phenom 9950 has four 64-bit CPU cores at 2.6 GHz, A total of 758 million transistors. But only does 41.6 GFLOPS.

Where as AMD through their ATI division is making a Radeon HD 5970 with 2 256-bit cores, 4,308 million transistors, and a impressive 5440 GFLOPS of processing power.

With the large sizes (in the GBs) of DDR ram available to the graphics card. I was just envisioning building a dedicated GPU that will get the raw data from the CPU (such as a map of a area in a vedio game) and the CPU will only have to tell the GPU what is the X,Y,X and bearing of the person/characters to generate the map for example in a modern video game. Which is what many online games today do to limit the bandwidth requirements between the players.



Depending on the specific year, I was either not alive yet, or too young to know what a computer is.

But I am looking it up as I am typing this.

Dimitri

Sure; but, this doesn't apply to my use-case. Even if it did, it would require I download code to video terminal, which greatly complicates matters if you are running the game in a windowed environment. The video hardware certainly cannot expect to know every possible graphical application I want to run.

You might be right, I may indeed be complicating matters.

Dimitri