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Any such thing as hardware/software NICs?

D

DesignDawg

Diamond Member
Hey all,

NICs have never been that big a deal to me. You buy a NIC, you put it in, you hook it up. Right? But I recently bought a new one for a enw computewr I am bullding, and I HAVE NEVER SEEN ONE SO SMALL! I swear to you, it is like a stick of RAM with a metal place on it that plugs into the PCI slot. --That made me start to wonder if there are hardware and software NICs like there are modems. Anyone know? Are they really so uncomplicated and getting so advanced now that they can just make them tiny, or do I have less than an ideal NIC here?

Thanks,

Ricky
DesignDawg
 
I have never heard of a 'software NIC' before... But that doesn't mean they don't exist. 😉

My network card is small, not as small as you make that one sound. I guess it's possible that it would be a WinNIC (Software NIC) or something, but I don't think it's likely.

I would test it out in another operating system, but there's also a large chance that the operating system wouldn't even support it anyway.

-RSI
 
Update:

It's a Realtek 8139B. It has linux support and all that. I think it's actually a really GOOD NIC. --At any rate, it's not a win-nic or anything. I just read the specs on the realtek site, and it seems to be a pretty serious little card.

Ricky
DesignDawg
 
I have a RealTek and mine's that small as well. They just don't have many bells and whistles. Pretty simple stuff, gets the job done.
 
A few years ago, NICs had to use like 10 chips.

But since manufacturing of ICs has gotten so good, they can put it all one ONE chip.

They don't even use .18u- but I think the .35 they use is still plenty. You can put a few million transistors in that little chip they have there on that "stick of RAM". 🙂

Eric
 
oh, yeah.

I believe CNR is the first "software" NIC solution.

Although cards like the 3COM with their Parallel Tasking, take some load off the CPU. Cheaper cards *do* have some arbitration functions and stuff offloaded to the CPU I believe.

Eric
 
I've seen these too. They come with support for DOS, OS/2, various unixes... so they're not "winNICs". I guess that today, you can put all the required logic in just one chip, and so the PCB only needs to be big enough to hold that chip (and the 5V-9V converter). Actually, this is ideal for making on-board Ethernet...

And if I understand correctly, CNR is not software-modem. Intel incorporated their entire 82559 ethernet chip into the 815E's south bridge, and CNR cards are just physical interfaces to that chip.

-PJ
 
CNR slots aren't software, becuase the southbridge has the extra circuitry that would normally be on the ethernet card, so you should still get similar performance overall.

otherwise, all PCI and ISA NIC's are created the same, hardware wise. they all use hardware to communicated and decode etc. if yuo had a software nic, I'd feel sorry for you, because that would suck CPU power more then USB with ADSL (or Cable modem).

why? becuase the whole process of sending and recieving is alot more complex then you think. which is why the only software based communication devices that I think will make sense, is a 56K modem. even then, I'd rather keep my computer running at full speed all the time.
 
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