PCI slave performance (OT?)

[Daniel O'Connor]

Hi,
We make a custom PCI card used for transferring data from our radar system 
acquisition chassis to a PC. It is rather old and we are looking at updating 
it but I would like to try and squeeze out as much performance as possible to 
satisfy our existing customers.

It is a PCI slave only device using a PLX-9051 to read data from a FIFO. This 
means that we can't use prefetch or bursting because the PLX chip can throw 
data away in these circumstances :(

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the maximum sustainable speed has dropped 
when we switched from 4.x to 6.x, but we also changed from i386 to amd64 and 
used different motherboard chipsets so it's difficult to know where the 
problem really lies.

I plan on doing some tests to try and determine what is causing the slow down 
but I would appreciate any suggestions people may have :)

One idea I did have was to get a dual core CPU and then one core would spend 
all its time reading from the PCI bus while the other did data processing, 
etc..

Any suggestions gratefully received!

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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