RComp [4] are pleased to announce that our 100Mbit network cards began shipping today (Saturday). These new cards are the result of a partnership in the RISC OS [5] market ensuring the production of high performance, yet cost effective hardware.
The new cards set standards in price, performance and features. Fitting into the network slot present in all RiscPC/A7000 systems (no backplanes etc. required), the performance of the card is only limited (on current machines) by the speed at which the processesor can handle network packets, when used on a 100Mbit network.
In practice, this results in 10Mbit performance of up to 1Mbyte per second, and 100Mbit performance of circa 2Mbytes a second, although this will depend on the machine used, and also the network software - for example, Acorn Access doesn't scale
well to 100Mbit network cards, whereas LanMan98 scales better.
The cards have 16kbytes of packet buffer (twice that of some alternative 100Mbit cards) to ensure reliability at high speeds.
So, the performance is good, the price, at 89ukp including VAT and UK delivery, is one of the lowest retail prices for a new RISC OS [6] network card.
And features? Well, of course the card handles 10 and 100Mbit networks, but it also has 512kbytes of flash memory on-board, which can be used for user-modules, software updates and so-forth. A flash utility is also provided. And that's not all. During the field test period of the last few weeks whilst we waited for final backplates and the like, we have chosen also to include support for automatic Boot-P address configuration with the card.
This is used by many university and business networks to assign each machine a network address, which could otherwise have proven difficult and/or costly for RISC OS users. For 89ukp you get support for this thrown in.
To summarise, for 89ukp you get a high performance network card, with lots of extra features, produced by a partnership of RISC OS companies looking towards the future of the RISC OS marketplace.
If we were American, we'd probably call it a "no brainer". But we're not, so we won't.
