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Date:      Sat, 4 Oct 1997 20:05:25 +0600 (ESD)
From:      "Serge A. Babkin" <babkin@hq.icb.chel.su>
To:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   PCI slowness ?
Message-ID:  <199710041405.UAA09967@hq.icb.chel.su>

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Hi!

I've made a simple driver to test the SCSI throughput. It takes
2 NCR53c810A SCSI cards and starts to transfer data between them
at (theoretically) 10MBps synchronous rate. But in fact I get at most
8.5MBps ! I was able to rase it from 7.5MBps to 8.5MBps
by changing the memory access options in NCRs from simplest
to maximal optimization so probably the PCI or memory
bus limits the throughput. Can anyone suggest me what's
the problem ?

The chipset is Intel Triton on some chineese motherboard
with 75MHz Pentium, memory is 60ns EDO. 
Theoretical PCI throughput is 33M
of 4-byte transfers per second (the card claims to work
in burst mode). Theoretical memory throughput is at least
10M of 4-byte transfers per second if we suppose that
the memory cycle with all overhead is 100ns and the
card reads by 4 bytes at a time. But the experiment
shows throughput of only 17MBps or 4.25M of 4 byte
transfers. Does the processor eats all the remaining 
throughput (although I think it must load most of the
code it runs at idling into the cache) ?

And another thing. I know that expensive machines like
DEC Prioris have possibilities to change some PCI
timing parameters for PCI cards. My cheap box does
not have anything like. May be that's the problem ?

Thanks for any clue!

-SB



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