1-2
C
HAPTER
1: I
NTRODUCTION
High-Performance Features of the 3C359 NIC
The 3C359 NIC delivers the token ring industry’s highest
performance for the lowest cost, and is designed to provide
years of trouble-free operation. This section describes the
NIC’s high-performance features.
Parallel Tasking II Performance
The 3C359 NIC’s design incorporates new Parallel Tasking
®
II
performance, which takes advantage of the latest
developments in PCI bus design to deliver the fastest data
throughput and lowest CPU utilization of any token ring NIC.
Parallel Tasking II performance is built upon a solid
foundation of proven Parallel Tasking architecture, which
introduced data pipelining and overlapping task processing
to improve throughput and achieve the industry’s fastest
data transmission and reception speeds.
DynamicAccess
Class of Service
3Com’s DynamicAccess
™
software adds intelligence to the
3C359 NIC for optimized performance and control. With
DynamicAccess Class of Service (Traffic Prioritization),
you can select time-critical applications that require the
highest-priority access to your network—such as multimedia
sessions. Based on your selection, the network device driver
recognizes high-priority applications, prioritizes their data
transmissions, and accelerates their data transmissions in the
following ways:
■
The NIC implements dual queues, allowing high-priority
traffic to be queued for transmission before
normal-priority traffic.
■
High-priority traffic is allowed to request and use
high-priority tokens (as specified in the IEEE 802.5
standard). This tends to reduce the latency experienced
in acquiring a suitable token for transmission onto
the network.
Class of Service (Traffic Prioritization) is available only with
the NDIS 4.0 miniport driver supporting the following
operating systems: Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98.
Book Page 2 Saturday, November 1, 1997 3:13 PM
