Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 16:24:18 -0800 (PST) From: Michael Kiernan <mkiernan@lucasdigital.com> To: bannai@best.com Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, wmurphy@mediacity.com Subject: Re: Gigabit ethernet cards! Message-ID: <199803280024.QAA12056@moana.kerner.com> References:
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Hi, Check www.gigabit-ethernet.org for a reasonably complete list of companies in the gig-e market. I know Alteon is manufacturing the card sold by Sun. Essential Communications is working on PCI cards as well. I believe Packet Engines also makes cards. I haven't used any of these NICs, so no endorsement is implied. From what I've heard, whereas PCI HiPPI NICs can get up to 700+ Mbps while consuming 30-40% of a CPU with a well-tuned driver, PCI gig-e NICs are still at the stage where getting 350 Mbps completely saturates a CPU. If I recall correctly, the system used in the comparisons was some type of high-end, dual-processor risc workstation. Of course the manufacturers are busy tweaking away. If you've got a multiprocessor system with enough CPU capacity and you need the bandwidth, however, it does work. There are some sites using them in large fileservers. The switches themselves are great. Most of the vendors appear to be taking the course of embedding the IP and IPX routing in hardware, eliminating the traditional performance penalty of going through a router. I'm able to pump 450+ Mbps across multiple gig-e links, including one unit configured as an IP router, and I don't seen any evidence of the throughput topping off (if I could just get more systems to run the tests on...). The IEEE spec is supposed to be finalized soon, so these boxes should start transitioning from bleeding edge to more mainstream (well, at least at the top-end). Mike PS. The numbers mentioned above are based on netperf's tcp streams test. >From: Vinay Bannai <bannai@best.com> >Subject: Gigabit ethernet cards! >Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 15:44:05 -0800 (PST) >To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG >Cc: wmurphy@mediacity.com > >Hi folks, > >I remember seeing a thread about Cisco selling a Gigabit ethernet card for >around $150. I could not find enough information about where to get this >card from either in the mailing list archives or the Cisco web siet. >Does anyone have this information? Also, any information on other gigabit >ethernet cards is also appreciated.. > >Thanks >Vinay >-- >Vinay Bannai E-mail: bannai@best.com -- Michael Kiernan, Systems R&D, ILM mkiernan@kerner.com +415-721-3284 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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