Express Logic recently reported that its NetX TCP/IP stack has achieved 94 Mbits/s, a 94% wire speed on Freescale’s ARM Cortex-M4-based Kinetis processor. The Kinetis has a 100-Mbit/s Ethernet port, which enables transfers at up to wire speed. Generally, TCP/IP stacks are less than 100% efficient, leading to performance well below wire speed. To facilitate rapid data transfer, the closer to wire speed, the better.

Note that NetX achieved 94% of full wire speed while using less than 50% of the processor’s cycles. This frugal use of CPU cycles is equally outstanding, as it allows many other functions to run during TCP/IP activity without slowing network performance.

NetX performance was measured using the open-source, industry-standard network throughput benchmark tool, “iperf.” Iperf was run on a Windows host, connected to a Freescale Kinetis target board via Ethernet. The iperf TCP and UDP results were served by NetX as a Web page, displayed by Internet Explorer on the host.

NetX TCP/IP is available for ThreadX, in full source-code form, royalty free, with project licenses starting at $12,500.

Richard Nass