Networking has nothing to do with cycle counters. It has to do with pure
measured performance. I checksummed 128Mb of data. I also checksummed 128Mb
of data will continually doing bus mastering DMA to memory.
Thats a real world test. If it was that the two were within 10% I could
believe it was worth checking with cycle counters and high accuracy timers,
but its not 10% its a facto of 10.
Alan