Would a Zorro III X-Surf work at 100Mb/s?

[LoadWB]

Tonight I pulled the 4000D down to install 16MB on the mobo.  Way back a long time ago I had pulled the 16MB off because I had been told (erroneously, unless it varies by accelerator) that the 16MB would be higher priority than memory on the accelerator.

I told you that to tell ask you this.  When I booted up and  checked on the system (happily finding 144MB FastRAM) I noticed that the X-Surf reports as Zorro II.  Even though PCI expansion boards probably make this a moot point, I pondered as to whether a Zorro III X-Surf would be fast enough to support 100Mbps, or at least fast enough to fake it?

[alexh]

AFAIK there are very few (no?) 100Mbit ISA NIC's and so the conversation is moot.

The X-Surf uses a 10Mbit ISA NIC (1.25Mbyte/s) well within the bandwidth of it's ISA to Zorro II bridge.

[Amigaz]

The X-surf cards are only ZII

[alexh]

AMIGAZ wrote:
The X-surf cards are only ZII

I think that LoadWB knows that. I believe he's speculating whether it would be possible to make a 100Mbit Zorro III ethernet card that would take advantage of the higher bandwidth available and work at 100Mbit speeds.

One of the reasons that Jens Schoenfeld did not make a ZIII version is that it would have limited his market. It would not have worked in Amiga 2000's or towered A1200's.

[platon42]

> AFAIK there are very few (no?) 100Mbit ISA NIC's and so the conversation is moot.

There is, and I've written a driver for a zorro II prototype. Unfortunately, the TCP/IP software usually is already at its limits performancewise, and except for having a 100MBit endpoint, the speed gain is indeed moot.

Things might be different with Zorro III DMA, but this is a bit tricky. In any case you need to be using a different TCP/IP stack than MiamiDx (hey, where's Roadstar 68k, wasn't it to be release 5 years ago?), which is already at its limits when doing NAT/Gateway/PPPoE functionality below 100KB/sec with a 68060@50MHz. I haven't been able to push Miami above 800KB/sec at any settings.

[BR]

Does anyone know if Jens is still around, alive and
well? The end of last december he sent mail asking for
my snail mail address so he could send me a replacement
chip for my "still under warantee" XSurf II. He said
he'd send it right after the first of the new year.
Since then I haven't heard a thing. No response to
multiple email's. I even sent mail on his web site,
no response. I dont understand why he'd ask for a purchase
invoice, offer to send the chip that went bad, ask for
my mailing address, then withdraw product support with
no explanation.
Bob Reising

[Zac67]

Many years ago I messed with an ISA 100 Mbps card in one of our - even then ancient - Netware 4 servers. I got it to work more or less but the performance wasn't exciting.
As Chris wrote, there's not much point in having a 100 Mbps connect reported that is no faster than a 10 Mbps connect.

I'm currently fiddling around with my new Prometheus bus board (anyone's got a spare Voodoo 3?) and a RTL8139, but I have no hope that throughput moves beyond 1 MB/s, if at all.

[alexh]

Chris, did you ever get that PCMCIA PC-Card USB Host I sent you? (Through Michael Boehmer).

[Doobrey]

platon42 wrote:
hey, where's Roadstar 68k, wasn't it to be release 5 years ago?

Didn't Olaf say in one of the CAM's that he had an agreement with Hyperion that Roadshow 68k wouldn't be released before OS4 (IIRC, there was a date clause too)?

[weirdami]

@BR

Does anyone know if Jens is still around, alive and well?

I think he's been posting on the comments of the news item about Clone-A.

[BR]

Ok, thanks! If he's posting he must be alive and
well. >
Bob Reising

[Framiga]

i can't get more than 800-830Kbps me too (X-Surf2 on LAN) with MosNet 1.2 and MOS for PowerUP :-/ funny thing is that i'm now on an ADSL2+ internet connection!

I would love a 100Mb NIC card but as Chris said...

[Crumb]

@platon42

Genesis is slightly faster than Miami and should give you more speed.

[Crumb]

@Zac67

I'm currently fiddling around with my new Prometheus bus board (anyone's got a spare Voodoo 3?) and a RTL8139,

Are you sure it's a RTL8139? AFAIK only RTL8029 is stable with the current firmware.

[platon42]

> Chris, did you ever get that PCMCIA PC-Card USB Host I sent you? (Through Michael Boehmer).

Indeed I saw it and held it in my hand once and it looked pretty nice. Unfortunately, I don't have a machine with a PCMCIA port that would fit this kind of card. If'd send you the docs and maybe even a framework, would you be able to write a low level driver for it yourself?