On Tuesday 24 Sep 2002 5:49 pm, Michael Kay wrote:
I'm personally rather sceptical of hardware solutions. Most of my
experience is that putting things in hardware can give a performance
boost at first (at the cost of very substantial investment in
development) but that software overtakes it in the end because the pace
of change is greater.
Sorry, this is getting a bit off-target, but it's relevent to the case for
appliance based XML processing.
I think this is a fairly well understood hardware problem if you are comparing
special purpose hardware to general purpose hardware. Intel etc just have way
more resources for making improvements in the long run.
What you can do is use a tight mix of software and hardware to get the best
out of both without blocking future hardware improvements or for that matter
software improvements. It's not a hardware or software thing, but a
hardware/software mix traded at different levels for performance/flexibility.
Working out what the mix should be is the hard part.
Kev.
kjones(_at_)sarvega(_dot_)com
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