[Soekris] Net 4801 performance

[Sully Mesry]

Yeah and this really bites, I hadn't given any thought to why my
transfers over my LAN to wan were slow until now, Now I am quite pissed
I didn't realize it sooner. I hope the next gen replacement for the 4801
can actually pump the throughput needed for the interfaces it has.

-----Original Message-----
From: soekris-tech-bounces at lists.soekris.com
[mailto:soekris-tech-bounces at lists.soekris.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Quast
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 9:10 AM
To: soekris-tech at lists.soekris.com
Subject: Re: [Soekris] Net 4801 performance

On 9/6/06, Stefano & Alberto <polna.antlab at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have performed the same measurements with an old 486 PC (should be 
> the same architecture as Soekris' Geode, right?) with NatSemi PCI 
> cards, and i've measured around 85Mbit/s... does anyone know why 
> there's this big difference? I expected the Soekris board to have 
> similar performance as a PC with similar processor...

When it comes down to it, the AMD Geode based machines are really damn
weak. Why is this so suprising to everybody? It is -hardly- a similar
processor. It just shares some of the same instruction sets. Its like
comparing a 486 intel to a cyrix based 486.

As somebody else has partially pointed out earlier in the thread, the
network adapters MAY be partly to blame.  I think I've also read
something of the topic that this geode amd processor or the bus it
communicates acrossed is very poor at handling interrupts compared to a
relatively similarly featured intel x86 machine.

I'm not a systems architect, so I can't say much on interrupt handling,
I just know this is a very common complaint with amd geode based boards.
I am continually suprised at what people expect out of these boards.

For instance, there are similar complaints of using a crypto
accellerator card. Because of the high interrupts and the slow
communication between the CPU and card, it is  hardly worth using.
I've seen openssl tests that perform *lower* on some encryption types
when using a crypto card on soekris, or any other similarl amd geode
based board such as a wrap.

It's slow, cheap, and is low power and efficient. Its like buying a
station wagon and wondering why its so slow.
_______________________________________________
Soekris-tech mailing list
Soekris-tech at lists.soekris.com
http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech