Some network performance benchmarks

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, 

 I've been playing around with the nios2 linux distro on an altera cyclone dev board. I think it's pretty neat system. I've done some UDP benchmarks, to see what the maximum network throughput is. On the nios end I had a simple application waiting for 4Kbyte packets, and sending back a 5 byte reply. On the PC side I had a java application communicating with the nios board. My test showed that the maximum throughput to the board was around 800 kbytes per second, which is not too bad. I wonder if doubling the cpu speed would speed that up. My possible applicatoin would take multiple data streams from the network and write them to a hard drive, however I need more than 1 M/second transfer rate, so it might be a better choice to go to a low cost embedded pc running linux instead.  Also, a question comes to mind, why would anyone use the nios + linux combination when its possible to buy a highly integrated 486 type system and run linux on that. After all using nios+various peripheral cores means paying royalties to Altera, and I don't see how in the end that would end up being less expensive than getting a ready made pc.  -Thomas

[Altera_Forum]

My tests show the same. Talks that I have had with various people indicate that this is in part due to system throughput (DMA isn't used for the smsc lan chip), so I would expect some improvement with increased clock. Additionally in what little time I have spent looking at the kernal code, I seem to remember the MorethanIP driver using DMA so you may get more mileage from that solution. You could get one of the Microtronix uKits and test both. 

 As far as why... in my case we need to be very power consumption wary and implementing a Altera solution is much more power friendly.