> Modern PC northbridge chips (probably) have a reasonable data path
> into memory, the same could not be said for some of the earlier
> silicon we (keeping the company name out of things) were trying to
> use for pentium-pro servers. 100M just didn't work!

At a past job, we were trying to use an Alpha box as a backup server.
It wanted to, conceptually, stream data from the network onto tape.
Both network and tape were behind the same PCI bus.  Performance was
absolutely pitiful.  Batching things into RAM helped.

I did a lot of poking at it and eventually came to the conclusion that
the PCI glue hardware behaved very badly when there were multiple
devices doing transfers at approximately the same time.  Too late, we
found out that this was a known problem with that chipset (sorry, I
don't recall what it was)....

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