steve@cheviot.UUCP (04/27/87)
Can anyone give me some information about the relative merits of the Ethernet Controller chips produced by Intel, AMD and NS. Does anyone else manufacture similar products? Thanks in advance. -- SENDER : Steve Grimes. PHONE : +44 91 232 9233 ARPA : steve%cheviot.newcastle.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk JANET : steve@uk.ac.newcastle.cheviot UUCP : steve@cheviot.UUCP
cyrus@hi.UUCP (04/29/87)
In article <2094@cheviot.newcastle.ac.uk> steve@cheviot.newcastle.ac.uk (Steve Grimes) writes: >Can anyone give me some information about the relative merits of the Ethernet >Controller chips produced by Intel, AMD and NS. Does anyone else manufacture >similar products? Here at the University of New Mexico we have designed a computer that uses AMD's Lance chip (local area network controller - Am7990). We have the lance running under a 32016 processor. We LOVE it. It makes things sooooo easy. All that is needed in hardware is two chips and some assorted resisters and capacitors. Also needed are the chips to interface the lance to your bus, or processor. Very little board space is needed. As far as the software goes, the lance also makes that very easy. I recommand the lance. -- @__________@ W. Tait Cyrus (505) 277-0806 /| /| University of New Mexico / | / | Dept of EECE - Hypercube Project @__|_______@ | Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131 | | | | | | hc | | e-mail: | @.......|..@ cyrus@hc.dspo.gov or cyrus@hc.arpa or | / | / {gatech|ucbvax|convex}!unmvax!hi!cyrus @/_________@/
normt@ihlpa.UUCP (04/29/87)
In article <2094@cheviot.newcastle.ac.uk>, steve@cheviot.UUCP writes: > Can anyone give me some information about the relative merits of the Ethernet > Controller chips produced by Intel, AMD and NS. Does anyone else manufacture > similar products? A while back I went through a review of these chips and a couple others, (Thomson-Mostek and Rockwell make a 68802 LNET chip, and SEEQ makes a 8003) Both of these I would NOT recommend, the SEEQ has some severe throughput problems, since it does not have an on-chip DMA channel. The 68802, to my knowledge, is a vapor-chip (i.e. non-existant in reality). The three you mentioned are all good, with different merits. The intel 82586 is good for interfacing to Intel processors, (it is used in a lot of monitoring equipment, and the AT&T 3BNet cards.) The Lance (AMD) and the NIC (National) are both excelent quality, we went with the National, because it is designed to DMA into some local packet buffers, the NIC does all the buffer management (ring buffers) and all you have to do is request the next packet and it will DMA (with a second DMA channel) into your system memory or a fifo interface or whatever. It also is register directly accessable, you don't need to DMA the instructions into it. I believe the Lance has instructions and all the buffer management info DMA'ed into it. A full system is the NIC it's associated Serial Network Interface (8391), memory and (in my case) 2 373 latches for the system inteface. (I'm using 2 32Kx8 static rams chips) But as I said the National and the AMD are very similar, whereas the Intel is very good for interfacing in an Intel environment. Norm Tiedemann ihnp4!ihlpa!normt AT&T Bell Labs Naperville, IL 60566