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Where's Our Terabit Ethernet?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Feb 28, 2008 11:52 AM
from the i-already-made-a-bandwidth-pr0n-joke-today dept.
from the i-already-made-a-bandwidth-pr0n-joke-today dept.
carusoj writes "Five years ago, we were talking about using Terabit Ethernet in 2008. Those plans have been pushed back a bit, but Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe this week is starting to throw around a new date for Terabit Ethernet: 2015. He's also suggesting that this be done in a non-standard way, at least at first, saying it's an opportunity to "break loose from the stranglehold of standards and move into some fun new technologies.""
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Stranglehold? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stranglehold? (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, it's not like this is going to affect TCP or IP or whatnot--this is way down at the bottom of the OSI model at level 1.
Parent
Re:Stranglehold? (Score:4, Insightful)
Standards should be decided on BEFORE the material comes out. In this case it's not such a big deal, as the only people who are going to want terabit ethernet are huge enough geeks (or companies) to support whatever standard they choose but for the most part a lack of standards hurts everyone (just look at IE/Office, those are 'competing' standards...would you call them a good thing?)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case it's not such a big deal, as the only people who are going to want [HD players] are huge enough geeks (or companies) to support whatever standard they choose
Your quote applies equally well to his example as to what you were saying.
just look at IE/Office, those are 'competing' standards...would you call them a good thing?
They're not standards at all, that's the problem. IE's supposed to be compatible with the standard and it's not, so your example seems moot. Office has no standard at all, which would seem to be compatible with the discussion, but the big difference is that it's gone well beyond the point where there should have been a standard.
However, I don't think any products should make it to the market before there's a standard developed. C
Re:Stranglehold? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are still a few token rings and other such mesozoic cruft wandering around in the wild out there, but they still work--because some clever folks invented a way to get from one kind of network to another.
Keep in mind, also, that it's really only the early adopters--those who are willing to buy 1st-generation equipment--who would get 'screwed over', and they have, by definition (as the first generation of a given kind of thing is always several times more expensive than the 'production' generations), the money to waste on this sort of thing.
Parent
Re:Stranglehold? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't anyone remember the bad old days before TCP/IP over Ethernet became standard?
How many organizations are still laboring to expunge the last remaining vestiges of Token Ring, IPX, Netware, etc.?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Early research indicates IP protocols will not scale well with high speed links. CPU load goes through the roof and because of limited buffer sizes relative to line speeds, retries and fallbacks plague applications. The end result is a slow, high speed link.
In a nut shell, for high speed links to become useful to a large category of users, IP, and especially TCP must be revamped. S
Re:Stranglehold? (Score:5, Insightful)
You would need to use the existing protocols on some level, but the protaocols to hit terabyte might need to be different. So he is saying Think about how to get reach the goal firsts, then delve into the protocol arena. If it is superior then eventually we would discard the older protocols and only use the new one.
Parent
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Wednesday? (Score:2)
Re:Wednesday? (Score:5, Funny)
Like porn?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
but but but (Score:4, Informative)
K, just RTFA, and let me save the rest of you folks the suspense: There isn't one. It's a blurb about breaking standards and terabit ethernet. The slashdot summary just about nailed it.
Re:but but but (Score:5, Funny)
So, are we at the start of the end times now?
Parent
Re:but but but (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know, but we probably wouldn't be getting laid there.
Four stories down, you whiner. (Score:2)
Long Time (Score:2)
Meh, it's a shitload of data either way...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seven years is the blink of an eye, kid.
Who needs it? (Score:5, Informative)
6 x as fast as 32-bit 2.8GHz HyperTransport
16 x as fast as x16 PCIe 2.0
60 x as fast as 20GFC fibre channel
400 x as fast as SATA-300
700 uncompressed 1080p HDTV streams (24bpp, 30fps)
15 million telephone calls
Other than the LHC, who the hells needs that kind of bandwidth?
Re:Who needs it? (Score:5, Insightful)
10 Commodore 64s
20 BBC Micros
640 ZX-81s
6 times a SDSS floppy disc
Who needs that kind of memory?
We might not need terabit ethernet *now*, but in 25 years time, it may be the basic expectation of your LAN's speed.
Parent
Re:Who needs it? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not to say someone won't come up with some application that requires a ton of bandwidth (distributed neural nets?), but none of our current applications would even really scale up to requiring 10GbE. The only realistic thing that comes to mind is some sort of Super HD video format, but anything like that is at least a decade away.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
- over 10 DEC PDP-11/45s running the RSTS time-sharing system
The maximum memory on these things was 28K words (16-bit) without memory extension hardware. In the 70s we had 8 users on a system with 28K of memory sorting lists, printing reports, data entry, editing with TECO, batch runs in the background at low priority, with relatively few swap thrashing problems. I implemented an ultra-low priority batch mode that waited until there was nothing else running for 5 minutes before act
Re:Who needs it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Free clue: 10Gb ethernet is currently used mostly in clusters and as backbones for large network installations to move lots of data around very fast. It's a long way off being a LAN technology. In seven years time, Terabit ethernet will be used mostly in clusters and as backbones for large network installations and 10Gb ethernet will be a LAN technology.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who needs it? (Score:5, Funny)
81 lunabits per second.
Parent
For those of you playing at home, a TB is (Score:5, Funny)
For those of you playing at home, a TB is a lot more than you can ever use in a million years...unless you link off the pirate bay, then it's not quite enough.
Re:For those of you playing at home, a TB is (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1Gbs is a bit slow when backup up a 1TB hard drive to the network server at home. ;-)
1 Gb is 128 MBs. According to Storagereview.com [storagereview.com] the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 is the only terabyte drive that has a transfer rate (104 MB/s) which maxes out high enough to even come near filling a gigabit pipe.
The bottleneck is your hard drive.
I'm SHOCKED, shocked I tells 'ya (Score:2)
By now, I'd have thought that that with all the blown predictions like this, that it would only be a story if one actually came true.
I'd sooner have... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Also remember that, even if you get a decent DSL modem, they may still have you allocated under a lower performance profile just out of average expect
Misleading name, "Ethernet". (Score:5, Interesting)
No, he suggested that five years ago
We don't yet have the technology described (wave division multiplexing) in our homes because very, very few of us want to bother with fiber in our homes at all.
You can push an amazing amount of data over glass, no one would claim otherwise. You can't, however, drape it across the floor and up the stairs to your switch for a quick LAN connection... Not only does terminating a fiber suck, the first time the dog steps on that little yellow wire, end of connection. By contrast, I've used Cat5 as a structural material (tied a PC to a hook on the ceiling with it) WHILE USING IT for data.
So no, we won't see terabit ethernet anytime soon, unless someone figures out a way to push it over copper.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I told the fiber cable sales guy I was going to test their sample by placi
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Proprietary protocols (Score:2)
Bob Metcalfe, hater of open source (Score:4, Interesting)
Has this guy done anything relevant in the past couple of decades? Here's a choice quote [infoworld.com] of his:
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
He can always point to DJB as a worse curmudgeon, so there is that solace in knowing he isn't t
Wait... you believe Metcalfe WHY? (Score:5, Interesting)
Metcalfe is also known for his harsh criticism of open source software, and Linux in particular, predicting that the latter would be obliterated after Microsoft released Windows 2000: Just because he did something really cool 35 years ago doesn't make him an expert on related matters now.
It's about Shannon's law too. (Score:5, Interesting)
In a way it can be tweaked a bit, and that has caused a confusion among those that aren't well into the technological difference between Baud (modulation changes per second) and BPS (bits per second).
Anyway - The classical phone modems can have a speed up to 56kbps, but effectively they stay at 28 to 33kbps. And that on a line that actually only provides 3kHz bandwidth. The trick is that in the 3KHz bandwidth you can have a carrier with less than 3000 modulation changes per second, often 2400. In each modulation change you not only have one bit transferred, but multiple bits. This is achieved by having a variation in both phase and amplitude of the signal.
So to utilize the cabling at the extreme speeds that a terabit Ethernet is you may have to resort to the same technique.
There have also been other techniques in use like using multiple carrier frequencies, like what the Telebit Trailblazer modems did. That technology was very resilient to interference compared to the CCITT standards, but it had other disadvantages instead.
Progress! (Score:5, Funny)
So, 5 years ago, Tb-E was 5 years away, and now its 7 years away. So by 2015, it should be about 10 years away, and by 2025 it should be about 14 years away, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So, 5 years ago, Tb-E was 5 years away, and now its 7 years away. So by 2015, it should be about 10 years away, and by 2025 it should be about 14 years away, etc.
Talk about exponential backoff...
I will Settle For 1Mbps (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I will Settle For 1Mbps (Score:4, Informative)
Consumer grade copper gigabit in crappy low-end PCs (made in the last 4 years) should be able to give you at least 300mbit of transferred data over TCP given 10 minutes of tuning, and using the correct cables.
Don't use a USB NIC. Don't transfer your data to/from a 4000rpm laptop hard drive... Etc..
You're not going to get 1Gbps though, 'cause your hard drive probably can't go that fast. The average low-end desktop drive isn't going to give you more than 30MB/sec. Depending on your system, the bus you have the NIC plugged into can't do 1000mbps. Your network can handle the advertised speed just fine though. If you've got high end gear (motherboard, disk array) you can peg a gigabit ethernet link in a point to point transfer... Right now it's not the ethernet holding consumer grade equipment back.
Parent
Put off in favor of wireless. (Score:5, Insightful)
I humbly submit that the R&D money that could have increased the upper boundary of Ethernet speeds was spent to bring wireless to the masses. Five years ago, if you'd told me WiFi would now be a year away from nominal speeds of 250Mb/s I might have thought you were talking about prototypes. The dorms where I was a tech had just finished upgrading from 10Mb/s to 100Mb/s Ethernet. The few laptops that were sold with external wireless cards had nominal speeds of 10Mb/s. But now we have 802.11g and next year we should have 802.11n on the store shelves.
I think we've gained much more by pushing out the median speed of wireless than we could have gained from pushing out the marginal speed of twisted pair.
Re:2015 (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)