Performance of Tulip/PNIC chips

Chris Worley cworley@altatech.com
Mon Nov 30 11:01:36 1998


Hi,

I building a Linux-based router/gateway and am planning to use three
Tulip cards.

Can the tulip-based controllers make efficient use of a 100 Mhz bus
interface PCI (vs. 66MHZ)?
In other words, do they do burst transfers at the 100 Mhz speed, or
would there be little difference with the slower bus?

I'd like to know the amount of buffering in the chip as well as the
default in the driver (I figure the driver buffers basically the MTU
times the number of allocated Tx and Rx ring buffers... is that
right?).  The reason is to understand how much "skid" there is to work
with on the router and on my real-time application.

Thanks,

Chris