Re: [PARPORT] how fast is a parallel port really?


Frederick Barnes (frmb@mail.cern.ch)
Tue, 28 Sep 1999 09:29:10 +0200 (CEST)


On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Heather wrote:

> Someone recently asked me how fast PLIP is compared to an ethernet
> cross-connect. Since I'm aware by my lurking that parallel ports now
> have different styles (flavors? settings?) - ECP, etc. - and with modern
> drivers (thanks!) it occurs to me that I really don't know.
>
> In the old days I would have been fairly sure that ethernet was faster
> by a good margin. Anybody have more than subjective thoughts?

Nibble mode, where two PCs can communicate without tri-statable data
lines, can push 50k/s. EPP can typically acheive 500 k/s to 2 M/s.
Maximum ECP throughput is around 2.5 M/s (AFAIK). As for ethernet, in
the 10Mbps versions, the parallel port is faster, although there is some
delay when reversing the data stream in ECP mode (which EPP doesn't suffer
from).

Once PLIP supports ECP and other fast modes, it should be possible to get
some nice, fast, data streams.

Fred.

-- 
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Fred Barnes                                                              |
| Frederick.Barnes@cern.ch                        http://teddy.xylene.com/ |
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