Abstract

National Semiconductor commissioned Tolly to evaluate the InfoMover NE4100 Ethernet adapter, with the main focus on benchmarking PCMCIA Ethernet performance against desktop ISA-adapter baselines in both ODI and NDIS environments. The project was part of Tolly’s 1994 Industry Benchmark for PCMCIA LAN performance testing and was designed to determine how much performance mobile notebook users gave up, if any, when moving from traditional desktop Ethernet adapters to PCMCIA client adapters.  

The November 1994 Technology Spotlight explains that Tolly conducted one of the industry’s first comprehensive performance studies of both Ethernet and Token Ring PCMCIA LAN adapters. In addition to National Semiconductor, the broader benchmark included products from 3Com, IBM, Kingston Technology, Madge Networks, and Thomas-Conrad. For the NE4100, Tolly ran two separate Ethernet test suites: one using Open Data-link Interface drivers in a Novell NetWare 3.12 environment, and one using Network Driver Interface Specification drivers in an IBM OS/2 LAN Server Advanced 3.0 environment. Throughput was measured on a 10Mbit/s Ethernet LAN using a Network General Expert Sniffer, while frame sizes were verified with a Hewlett-Packard Series J2300 analyzer.  

In the ODI suite, the NE4100 performed close to the ISA baseline. As shown on page 1, the adapter delivered 0.9Mbit/s at 64-byte frames, 1.8Mbit/s at 256 bytes, 2.6Mbit/s at 512 bytes, 3.7Mbit/s at 1,024 bytes, and 5.4Mbit/s at 1,512 bytes. With packet burst enabled at the 1,512-byte maximum frame size, the NE4100 reached 9.5Mbit/s versus a 9.6Mbit/s baseline, placing it within 0.77% of baseline. Tolly notes that at the other tested sizes, the adapter ran within 15% to 27% of baseline performance.  

The NDIS suite showed similarly strong results. On page 2, the NE4100 measured 0.8Mbit/s at 81-byte frames, 1.0Mbit/s at 256 bytes, 1.5Mbit/s at 512 bytes, 2.4Mbit/s at 1,024 bytes, and 8.7Mbit/s at 1,514 bytes. At the maximum frame size with packet burst, it performed within 1.28% of the baseline, while at the other frame sizes it stayed within 11% to 16%. The report identifies support for ODI driver PCMDM.COM version 1.11 and NDIS driver PCMDM.DOS version 1.7, operation over BNC or 10Base-T depending on media filter, and PCMCIA bus support. The test bed used a Toshiba T1910CS notebook with 12MB of RAM as the PCMCIA client and Compaq Deskpro 486 systems as the server and baseline client. Overall, the report presents the National Semiconductor InfoMover NE4100 as a strong-performing PCMCIA Ethernet adapter that came very close to desktop-class throughput, especially at larger frame sizes.