Killer NIC now supports Bit Torrent

KILLER NIC IS an interesting product, to say the least. The Network Interface Card, is designed for Online Gaming and we have recently received the unit, and have begun to play with it.

But even before the first day of our testing was completed, Killer NIC maker BigFoot Networks launched FN Torrent, a hardware-offloaded p2p application for downloading content without loading the CPU.

The idea of downloading Bit Torrent content without interrupting game-playing is extremely appealing to a wider crowd. We feel that there is also another potential bunch of users for this kind of accelerated p2p: game development studios and content creation studios.

In our talks with several game developers, we learned that there are some teams that use Bit Torrent software to share a codebase/rendered picture/animation and then distribute it to workers in different departments without killing the network bandwidth. With Killer NIC, this could even mean CPUs would stay fully free for other work, while gigabytes of data stream towards the workstations.

This is second major feature release for Killer NIC cards after the company launched a hardware firewall last November (FN Firewall), and demonstrates the flexibility offered by system-on-a-chip products such as this one.

While we may still quibble about the high price (generally due to the fact this product is made in the USA, not in China/Taiwan), BigFoot Networks did release a cheaper, fancy cooler-less product couple of weeks ago. µ