Liran Cohen wrote: >Upgrading can be done today on most of the hardware products , almost >every product in the field (networking) has a flash RAM which can be >changed (shiva devices , routers etc...) , regarding errors in >hard-coded software , there are already several patches and updates >for many devices . Are you talking about actual gate arrays? or firmware which is run by a processor core? I'm aware of how firwmare works, which is generally copied from a FLASH device to faster memory for actual execution by a CPU. And I understand the PLDs and FPGAs are theoretically reprogrammable, but they're too expensive, aren't they? You're not going to build an FPGA-based network adapter for under about US$ 5000, from what I understand (the iReady part is about $5.) I've re-read the Intel datasheet, and it appears the TCP/IP offload is in firmware rather than hardware. The Adaptec part, however, seems to be gate arrays; I haven't heard from anybody at Adaptec to prove or disprove this. I did get a response from somebody familiar with iReady, and he told me that early spins of the chip had some bugs which you basically had to just live with. I'm a software person rather than a hardware person, so feel free to educate me on this :-) Richard Masoner
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