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To: dennis@et.htp.com (dennis)
Cc: Tom Samplonius <tom@sdf.com>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Wanted: 100bT EISA ethernet recommendation 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 11 Jul 1995 11:18:12 -0400."
             <199507111518.LAA07160@mail.htp.com> 
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Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 11:41:14 +0000
From: Matt Thomas <matt@lkg.dec.com>
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> Tom's opinion....
> >
> >On Tue, 11 Jul 1995, dennis wrote:
> >
> >> The question is, who would build one? EISA cards are too expensive to build
> >> and EISA  is too slow for a 100mbs medium. If someone is making them then
> >> I'll bet they have a much bigger marketing dept than engineering.
> >
> >  That's wrong.  EISA is fast enough for 100mbs ethernet.
> 
> It can't be wrong, because any way you slice it its an opinion. Under light
> load anything will work, but under heavy load its nice if your bus
> throughput is greater than the bandwidth. If your EISA card is bus mastering
> it can take over your machine under heavy load. For a workstation, sure, but
> not for a server. And EISA is too expensive for a workstation.

EISA bus throughput is 33MB/s while 100baseT is at max 12.5MB/s.  Since that's
< 30% of the entire bus bandwidth, it is more than fast enough.  (Consider
that EISA handles FAST SCSI-2 just fine and that's about the bandwidth).

Back to the original question:

Intel and SMC both make EISA 100baseT card but none of them are based on
the DC21140.  I think AMD makes one too.  But none have FreeBSD drivers.

Cheers,

Matt Thomas               Internet:   matt@lkg.dec.com
3am Software Foundry      WWW URL:    <currently homeless>
Westford, MA              Disclaimer: Digital disavows all knowledge
                                      of this message