Each of these components and its mounting on the card means an increased risk of failure. Comtrol's ASIC was designed to serve functions that usually require multiple components. The result is the most reliable and economical serial port card available. Plus is designed to withstand such conditions. Plus ensure sustained transfer rates by buffering data when the CPU is busy.
Many serial cards have very small FIFOs, or buffers, used for transmitting and receiving data.
With smaller buffers, a card must stop each time the buffer fills and wait for the data to clear. This continual starting and stopping increases the load on the CPU and reduces the overall performance of the card. The large buffers help ensure consistent, high throughput even on heavily loaded servers. The ASIC design and larger FIFO buffers, combined with two dedicated 44 MHz processors for each of the four ports, gives RocketPort Plus the power to sustain throughput at speeds of up to 921 Kbps on each port simultaneously.