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 Croft 
Date:  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