<snip>
Of course it can, for example by using a single process environment, with
synchronous CPU/fast RAM to maximize banwidth, and hardware related signature
matching.
It's the same for 3D video cards : floating point calculations for 3D
rendering can be made by the CPU. But with dedicated hardware, it's multiple
times faster.
On an ASIC you could certainly get higher performance by designing
hardware to run only your pattern matching algorithm, but the biggest
problem you will have with dedicated hardware is the cost effectiveness
of your end product. Unless you plan to sell thousands of these, it's
probably going to be more cost effective just to run up a dedicated
linux box and renice the service to -10 or so: and it would certainly be
easier to deploy.
M.
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