Generally, TCP/IP stacks are less than 100% efficient, leading to performance well below wire speed. But at the Embedded Systems Conference Boston this week Express Logic announced that its NetX TCP/IP stack has achieved 94 Mbps, a 94% wire speed on Freescale’s ARM Cortex-M4-based Kinetis processor. The Kinetis has a 100-Mbps Ethernet port.
Express Logic also said this speed was achieved while using less than 50% of the processor’s cycles. This permits other product functions to run during TCP/IP activity without slowing network performance. NetX performance was measured using the industry-standard network throughput benchmark tool, “iperf,” an open-source software running on various platforms including Linux, Unix and Windows.