Description of Hardware
The original NTI PIX and the PIX Classic had cases that were sourced from OEM provider Appro. All flash cards and the early encryption acceleration cards, the PIX-PL and PIX-PL2, were sourced from Productivity Enhancement Products (PEP). Later models had cases from Cisco OEM manufacturers.
The PIX was constructed using Intel-based/Intel-compatible motherboards; the PIX 501 used an AMD 5x86 processor, and all other standalone models used Intel 80486 through Pentium III processors. Nearly all PIXs used Ethernet NICs with Intel 82557, 82558, and 82559 network chipsets, but some older models are occasionally found with 3COM 3c590 and 3c595 Ethernet cards, Olicom-based Token-Ring cards, and Interphase-based FDDI cards.
Some Intel-based Ethernet cards for the PIX are identified at boot with the designation "mcwa". This designation denotes a multicast receive bug in the card's firmware that the designers addressed with a feature they called Multi Cast Work Around.
Both the PIX 510 and 520 share basic components, such as motherboard, chassis, NICs, flash cards, etc., with the Cisco LocalDirector 416/420/430, the Service Selector Gateway 6510 (SSG-6510), and the Cisco Cache Engine CE2050, though the latter two run VxWorks, rather than a Finesse derivative.
The PIX boots off a proprietary ISA flash memory daughtercard in the case of the NTI PIX, PIX Classic, 10000, 510, 520, and 535, and it boots off integrated flash memory in the case of the PIX 501, 506/506e, 515/515e, 525, and WS-SVC-FWM-1-K9.
The PIX technology implemented in the FWSM, for the Catalyst 6500 and the 7600 Router, has a part code of WS-SVC-FWM-1-K9.
The PIX535 has a PCI-X 66 MHz/64 bit bus for expansion slots. This results in a much higher cleartext throughput, as the PCI bus is no longer the bottleneck (the PCI bus is 33 MHz and 32 bits, resulting in maximum throughput of 1.2 GBit without overhead taken in account). As the lower Cisco ASA models use a PCI bus, the PIX535 was faster for cleartext than its successor ASA, until the introduction of the ASA5580.
Read more about this topic: Cisco PIX
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