Hacker News Reader

Comment by sydthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't there ASICs for hosting web sites

"Johnson, why can't we push this security update?"

"Well boss, we thought it would be more webscale to use our own chip design, so we're kinda stuck, but the good news is that we've negotiated the cost of new masks down to 3 million dollars"

Related questions: why aren’t there ASICs to accelerate compilation

Because there's no point. A single server can push hundreds of Gbps of traffic already; using an ASIC would just make it less agile.

You might be able to bake some preprocessing of e.g. HTTP into the NIC, doing incrementally more work using well defined standards before delivering packets to the host. Especially with an FPGA.

IP and TCP often are.

This might be possible in the near future using smart NICs that support eBPF offload.

> Why aren't there ASICs for hosting web sites

Isn't this what ESP32 variants are trying to achieve? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266

No, that’s just a general purpose computer. ASICs are dedicated chips for a given task, where that task’s “program” is built into the chip and it can only do that.

While there may not be HTTP-specific ASICs, there certainly are SSL/TLS-offloading ASICs and general TCP-processing ASICs, found on higher-end network cards, in routers, etc.

And none of those are an ESP32

ESP32 can do it.

That's a general purpose microcomputer, not application specific!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com