Subject: RE: Gigabit Ethernet

From: "Bogdan Vacaliuc" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 07:01:25 -0400

On Tuesday, March 22, 2005 4:04 PM, Dan Malek wrote:

> On Mar 22, 2005, at 11:56 AM, Gilad Rom wrote:
> 
>> Has anyone ever tried using a Gigabit PCI
>> adapter with one of the Au1x00 boards? Any success?
> 
> Just remember that the Au1x00 boards are 32-bit , 33 MHz,
> 3.3V PCI, so choose your boards accordingly.  Please don't expect the
> Au1x00 to run the TCP/IP stack anywhere near Gigabit speeds ..... :-)

We have researching this topic for a little while, particularly from the FPGA standpoint.  Although not specific to MIPS, I offer a
few links which discuss the considerations for successfully sustaining gigabit ethernet transport.

The "Gigabit System Reference Design", pg. 49 offers some benchmarks obtained using MontaVista Linux on a PowerPC 405.  Key
takeaways are that the data payload must not be handled by the stack (DMA direct from framebuffer/fifo/sdram) and must use jumbo
(5000,9000) ethernet frames.

Best Regards,

-bogdan

---

EE Times, "Altera Demonstrates FPGA for video-over-IP", March 2005,
http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159903648 

Altera, "Video Over IP Reference Design", March 2005,
http://www.altera.com/solutions/refdesigns/sys-sol/broadcast/ref-video.html

Xilinx, "Gigabit System Reference Design", June 2004,
http://direct.xilinx.com/bvdocs/appnotes/xapp536.pdf 

Xilinx, "Considerations for High-Bandwidth TCP/IP PowerPC Applications", XCell Journal pg.14-16, Winter 2004,
http://www.xilinx.com/publications/xcellonline/xcell_51/xc_pdf/xc_xcell51.pdf 

Marco Riccioli, Xilinx "Getting the most TCP/IP from your Embedded Processor", Embedded World 2005,
http://www.treck.com/xilinx.pdf