SUN-3s talking to SUN-2s with 3COM boards

[John Little]

In article <1359 at umcp-cs.UUCP>, steve at umcp-cs.UUCP (Steve D. Miller) writes:
> 
>    I can readily believe that; people around here are of the opinion that
> the 3COM boards are inherently slow, while (a) the other Sun Ethernet
> board (ie) is apparently fast to begin with and (b) if code complexity is
> any indication (the driver is > 2000 lines, and pulls all sorts of strange
> memory tricks), has a driver that fully supports its speed.  The ec (3COM)
> driver is trivial in comparison.

The Intel 586 chip that most SUNs use to do Ethernet is not the
world's most reliable, bug free, well documented or well supported chip.
The last time I saw the bug list for the 586 it was five
pages long.  I suspect that much of the complexity is due to SUN's
working around various bogosities in the chip.

There are lots of good reasons why SUN's most recent machine (the 3/50)
uses the AMD 7990 instead of the Intel equivalent.

Note: I have no official connection with SUN, Intel or AMD.


John Little
{atari,sun,hoptaod}!portal!jel