From: utzoo!decvax!cca!croft@SRI-TSC@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: Re: Looking for Unix driver for Interlan Ethernet interface Article-I.D.: sri-unix.3109 Posted: Sat Sep 4 16:47:21 1982 Received: Wed Sep 8 06:53:59 1982 From: Bill CroftDate: 1 Sep 1982 at 1648-PDT Here is a note describing tests recently run by INTERLAN to determine the transmit performance of their NI1010 Unibus Ethernet Controller. The basic result is about 2 to 3 megabits per second maximum transmit rate. As far as I know, the 3COM board is in the same range. Of course what really counts is end to end thruput and this is more dependent on host buffering strategies and protocol efficiency. We'll have to wait for Berkeley's 4.2BSD network device benchmarks for an accurate comparison. The Interlan board does have the advantage of DMA operation, so it should be less load on the host CPU. (The NI1010A figures shown below are for the new bit-slice version of the board; the original NI1010 contains a Z80) --- TRANSMIT PERFORMANCE OF THE NI1010 ON A STANDALONE PDP-11/24 On an 11/24, the NI1010 was driven by a small MACRO-11 program that repetitively DMAed an Ethernet packet from UNIBUS memory to the controller which then transmitted it onto an idle Ethernet. The following tests consisted of measuring the time required to send 10000 packets of the given fixed size: Transmit Packet Size 64 bytes 200 bytes 800 bytes 1518 bytes -------- --------- --------- ---------- Packets 1010 699 290 171 per sec NI1010 .52 Mbps 1.12 Mbps 1.86 Mbps 2.07 Mbps transmit thruput NI1010A 1 Mbps 2.7 Mbps transmit thruput