Most things in a computer are relatively simple to understand: the RAM, the storage, the peripherals, and the software all work together to make a computer function. But the heart of your system, the CPU, seems like magic even to many tech people. Here, we’ll do our best to break it down.
Any long-time SparkFun reader may know that we
really enjoy writing about the whacking legal entanglements we ve experienced, whether it’s cease-and-desist letters from Sparc International, tossing out 4,000 DMMs, or dealing with counterfeit ICs. Unfortunately, now it’s time we talk about patent trolls.
Since a few of my international friends looked at me funny when I mentioned it, a
patent troll is a company that is specifically set up to purchase the rights to a handful of patents and then sue anyone they feel they can get money from.
Patent trolls are Americans that are destroying American manufacturing and small business. I ve got heaps of challenges when it comes to SparkFun, but patent trolls are what keep me up at night. SparkFun knows how to manufacture in America, and we ve created tons of new open source products, but patent trolls can come out of nowhere and do real harm. It s legalized extortion. There’s a few forms of this so let’s first talk about
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Over the last 50 years, we’ve made a lot of progress in developing the Internet from a tiny interconnection of a handful of computers to a worldwide fabric with billions of nodes. During that journey, we’ve learned an enormous amount about how to build networks and the routers that interconnect them. The mistakes that we all made generated some important lessons along the way, for those that chose to learn them.
In the beginning, routers were simply generic computers, with Network Interface Cards (NICs) attached to a bus.
Figure 1 Network interface cards attached to a bus.
This works to a point. In this architecture, packets enter a NIC and are transferred by the CPU from the NIC into memory. The CPU makes a forwarding decision and then pushes the packet out to the outbound NIC. The CPU and memory are centralized resources, bound by what they can support. The bus is an additional limitation: the bandwidth of the bus must be able to support the bandwidth of all of the NICs si
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