Proteon Inc’s announcement of a new set of modular software for its local network adaptor boards was more than a little confused. The company has unveiled a strategy, which it calls its advanced software architecture, ASA, which is designed to move processing work away from the personal computers and onto the adaptors, avoiding RAM-cram problems. Nothing wrong with that – a laudable aim especially since the company’s master plan promises that it will include a Simple Network Management agent on the card during the current quarter. The tricky part is the seemingly conflicting statements coming out of Proteon in the US and UK. In the original announcement, made by Carl Blume, senior product manager for network interface cards at Proteon US, the company gave a very gung-ho statement saying Until now, the processing power of the adaptor has been under-utilised… with ASA, Proteon uses this resource to offload the personal computer and execute where it is most efficient. The trouble is that, according to Steve Rhodes, support consultant at Proteon in the UK, the amount of processing that goes on in the card is minimal; there is no processing capacity other than that provided in the standard Texas Instruments Inc Token Ring chip set. Steve Rhodes says that the new architecture’s main aim is to free up memory in the personal computer, rather than to off-load a significant amount of processing work. However Proteon Inc’s approach is innovative in that it actually uses the Texas Instruments chip set for processing at all.
