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From: rlarso01@ic1d.harris.com (Ron Larson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Pentium Pro Compatibility?
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 1996 13:22:52 GMT
Organization: Harris Corporation
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References: <4dc4al$btp@makai.maui.net> <DL75vA.MtG@ritz.mordor.com> <30FA0310.794BDF32@FreeBSD.org>
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"Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>Chris Mauritz wrote:
>> I was told that the problem was not with the cpu, but with the
>> new PCI chipset. It apparently introduces a serious bottleneck
>> with respect to cpu to main memory bandwidth. I don't have
>Not quite. The details are as follows:
>With the first generation of the Orion chipset (the one currently being
>sold), there was a bug in the PCI write buffer logic. Vendors such as
>ASUS work around the problem by turning the PCI write buffer off all the
>time, and this generally works OK until you really start hammering the
>bus. We found this out when we tried to run 100Mb ethernet and found
>that the performance was half what it was with the Triton chipset.
>If you're not really beating on the bus, e.g. you just have a PCI scsi
>controller and 10Mb ethernet card, you probably will never notice the
>problem. If you try to do more than this, you'll fall over kicking.
>We've "solved" the problem by getting a machine directly from Intel with
>the new revision of the Orion chipset, but it's not a for-sale item yet.
>:-(
>--
> - Jordan Hubbard
> President, FreeBSD Project
Jordan,
Does this "solution" mean the new 600B+ user FTP server is "on
the way"?
Ron Larson
rlarso01@ic1d.harris.com