Please file this under "still trying to educate myself":

I am not a gamer, but I browse some things ($) I see while wandering around NewEgg.

A Bigfoot Network Killer "network processing unit (npu)".

Some sort of comment that the "real" reason to buy one of these (~$280) is that it is a Linux box on a card ("FNA apps").

Is this sort of like the GPU thing, where it is hoped that some cruncing can be off-loaded to a gpu? But, here its a npu instead of a gpu?

Can an installed npu benefit Rosetta in any way?

Please file this under "still trying to educate myself":

I am not a gamer, but I browse some things ($) I see while wandering around NewEgg.

A Bigfoot Network Killer "network processing unit (npu)".

Some sort of comment that the "real" reason to buy one of these (~$280) is that it is a Linux box on a card ("FNA apps").

Is this sort of like the GPU thing, where it is hoped that some cruncing can be off-loaded to a gpu? But, here its a npu instead of a gpu?

Can an installed npu benefit Rosetta in any way?

Only if you could get Linux Rosetta@home on it.

It's basically just a router on a card, My Router runs linux.

The power these things need to be are low the answer really is no.

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Team mauisun.org

The NPU is most likely (I'm 99% certain) not one of the ones that are currently supported by Rosetta. I would also say that I'm 99% sure the processor on this card doesn't do floating point in hardware - there probably is some floating point emulation library or something to support basic floating point, but it's there for functionality, not performance as such. At 400MHz and no hardware floating point, you're better off spending your $280 at the "computer scrapyard" buying some old computers, say a K6 or Pentium 2/3 based system, and some dollars on more memory...

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Mats

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The NPU is most likely (I'm 99% certain) not one of the ones that are currently supported by Rosetta. I would also say that I'm 99% sure the processor on this card doesn't do floating point in hardware - there probably is some floating point emulation library or something to support basic floating point, but it's there for functionality, not performance as such. At 400MHz and no hardware floating point, you're better off spending your $280 at the "computer scrapyard" buying some old computers, say a K6 or Pentium 2/3 based system, and some dollars on more memory...

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Mats

The heart of it (the bigfoot one anyway) is an e300 PowerPC as far as I know that just the centralised with a lot of added extrs around it.
It should have Altivec in there (not to sure they could be the e600 series).
Though BOINC itself could offload onto it and run (as many would like) having a centralise 'boinc client' with 'boinc apps' running over a network.
Hell if they did that I'd probably put it on my router ;-)

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Team mauisun.org