Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nbires!ico!dougm
From: dougm@ico.ISC.COM (Doug McCallum)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
Subject: Re: Western Digital board
Message-ID: <4953@ico.ISC.COM>
Date: 11 May 88 03:34:03 GMT
References: <21523@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Reply-To: dougm@ico.UUCP (Doug McCallum)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Boulder CO
Lines: 25

In article <21523@amdcad.AMD.COM> phil@amdcad.AMD.COM (Phil Ngai) writes:
>
>I was looking at the WD Ethernet literature and they make a big deal
>out of NOT having DMA. They claim dual ported memory makes system
...
>I was quoted a price of $207...

I've been using one for quite a while now and find it a nice, fast ethernet
interface.  The lack of DMA hasn't appeared to hurt performance any, but
then a 386/AT is pretty fast at moving the bytes off of the board.

The WD board is definitely one of the price/performance leaders in this
class of board.  Their ethernet board can frequently be found (as in the
price you quoted) in the same range as a lot of slow interfaces or other 
vendor's Starlan versions of an ethernet board.  WD also has Starlan for
what its worth.

There was some discussion some time back about the AT DMA controller being
slower than the string move instructions of a 286.  If that is the case,
the WD's approach would be better.  Several other AT ethernet controllers
also use the shared memory approach (MICOM/Interlan NI5210 for one).

		Doug McCallum
		Interactive Systems Corp.
		dougm@ico.isc.com