And that why you see more and more Gigabit Ethernet replacing stone-aged protocols such CAN, Profibus or Firewire, because a simple Ethernet Chip is dead cheap, >100x faster and comes with a modern memory-mapped driver, the others not. It makes hard real time latency and throughput much easier.
With CAN you cannot get very far, and the typical CAN multiplexing tricks get dirty very soon.
And real time latency is not "dead simple". A low priority message will always lose out to a higher priority message on CAN. With ethernet a low priority task can flood the bus if the circumstances are right.
I answered the Formula 1 MCU's (Motor Control Unit). Maybe the official one from Illmore already (I think), and some of the internal ones used for testing (which I worked with).
The NASA Space Shuttle also had several dSpace controllers on board (RTLinux with special IO drivers) and I guess modern rockets and planes also will switch to Ethernet also. It's 1MHz vs 1GHz. It makes a difference when you can afford a fast CPU, i.e. high speed controller and you don't want to wait for CAN messages coming in every 1000 cycles.
