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So you're essentially pushing against specialized IP-oriented VLSI chips in everything from NICs to switches to routers... instead they should all have been rec
by tpmx 5y ago
So you're essentially pushing against specialized IP-oriented VLSI chips in everything from NICs to switches to routers... instead they should all have been reconfigurable general computing devices?
Don't you think that would have slowed down the growth quite a bit?
- jedberg 5y agoMaybe. I'm just saying that we should teach people in the 60s to design for the future and make things extensible. Maybe we'd still have custom silicon, but they would be designed with an external bus to a second chip that can be easily switched out or upgraded or something as a way of dealing with future growth of address space. Obviously it wouldn't apply to everything, but back in the 60s future growth was clearly not thought about the same way as today.
- tpmx 5y agoThey could have had a design rule that all network endpoints must work with 32/64/128 bit IPs. This could perhaps have been implemented in VLSI back in the 80s in such a manner that 32-bit IPs ran at full speed, 64-bit at half speed and 128-bit at quarter speed.
- jedberg 5y agoYeah, perfect. If the standard had said IPs could have any bit length they would have designed accordingly.