is there a market for this?

Chris Wilson writes:

I was (somewhat) following a dicussion about high speed communications
handled over the PCI bus, and there's a company that makes T1/T3-level
serial cards for PC's, and from what they were saying, there's no way to
reach even a full T3 worth of bandwidth on a PCI bus,

PCI is 33mhz at 32bits = about a gigabit per second. Fast PCI is
66mhz, and a fast 64bit PCI standard is coming, which yields 4Gbps
across the bus. Now, admittedly, you can't get that fully -- but if
you claim you can't get a mere 45mbps across the bus per second you
are doing something desperately wrong and stupid, like making the main
CPU deal with *way* too much of the work. Of course, most serial
communications companies ARE doing things desperately wrong and
stupid, but that another story...

Perry

I'm not sure how the person who was discussing it on the other list was
doing it.. maybe they were talking about ISA :wink: In any case, I'd be pretty
fearful of running OC-level bandwidth over a PC... "Gee, the corporate
network went down because the router's hard drive crashed!"

Chris

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