10-Gigabit Ethernet Standard Approved 311
A little birdie brings news that that 802.3ae standard for 10 Gigabit/second Ethernet has been approved. Everyone out there with Gigabit Ethernet - you are now officially obsolete. The new standard is fiber only, no more of that nasty copper stuff.
What an informative link. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:not obsolete (Score:4, Informative)
Fine, I'll do it myself. (Score:2, Informative)
In meaningful terms (Score:5, Informative)
1 LoC (Library of Congress) = 10 Terabytes [jamesshuggins.com] = 10,000 Gigabytes
That's 0.000125LoC/sec, or roughly 2.22 hours to transfer the entire contents across 10GigE.
Wow.
Re:Can I actually use that? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Beowulf Cluster (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hit me with the clue-stick please! (Score:5, Informative)
IEEE
Consider yourself hit with clue-stick.
Re:not obsolete (Score:3, Informative)
Cisco 12000 10Gb line card [cisco.com]
or like this:
Catalyst 6500 10Gb line card [cisco.com]
Cisco did announce these a while ago.
Re:not obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
The other bottleneck with even high-end Intel-based servers could easily choke when dealing with not only 10 Gig Ethernet but also add Fiber Channel, multiple channels of Ultra 160 or Ultra 320 SCSI RAID, etc., since the memory bandwidth (and processor bus speed?) would then become the possibly the next bottleneck. RISC servers don't have that much of a problem just yet, but sooner or later it will be.
Re:In meaningful terms (Score:4, Informative)
It's 8:1 for storage, but generally 10:1 for network ratings (an example [mathworks.com] - more for serial ports, but it still applies), thanks to a header and a footer bit sent with every byte. Sometimes (rarely), throw in a parity bit for good measure.
Mind you, that's still only 2.78 hours.
Re:wither Cat6 ? (Score:3, Informative)
Many are missing the point here (Score:3, Informative)
And remember, Intel isn't the only hardware platform out there. While I don't know of a hardware platform that can make fully support the speeds needed, there are some that can support better than 4000 Kbps now.
Re:wither Cat6 ? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure that there will be a copper spec for 10 gigabit too, it's probably just not ready yet. Consider that people will be wanting to use this on the backplane of embedded network hardware, and blade servers.
Hairy smoking golfballs (Score:3, Informative)
Researchers have realized this for decades. Before enormous silicon chip densities became ordinary, engineers at IBM (IIRC) used to say that the future of computers was "hairy smoking golfballs". This captured a number of important characteristics of very fast computers:
Since those days, Intel and its competitors have fulfilled all of these predictions except for the spherical shape, which is much more difficult and not as important as the other characteristics.
A Pentium 4 is hairy - those 55 million transistors have a lot of connections; and smoking, as anyone whose CPU fan has broken can attest. It's smaller than a golfball in cross-sectional area. That size isn't just to make them more convenient! If a physically bigger CPU would be faster, you can bet someone would be building them.
Re:not obsolete (Score:2, Informative)
The "northbridge" of the Intel E7500 supports two PCI-X busses (more information about the chipset can be found here [intel.com].
The ServerWorks GC series support for PCI-X start from 2 independent busses (the GC-SL) up to six PCI-X busses (the GC-HE). Specs on the ServerWorks stuff is located here [serverworks.com].
I'm not completely sure if the AMD Hammer chipsets will include PCI-X support initially, but if one were to give up AGP 8x (which isn't really needed on a server) then you can turn that into a PCI-X bus to support a single 10 Gig Ethernet controller.
Of course, there is still the bottleneck of the memory subsystem which can make or break a high-end system.
Re:In meaningful terms (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not very familiar with 10gige technology yet, but my brief research shows that it uses 64B/66B coding (e.g., 2 overhead bits out of every 66). Running at a clock rate of 10.3125GHz, that gives you a full 10Gbps of throughput, or 1.25 GB/sec.
100baseT uses 5B/4B coding, which does result in 2 overhead bits out of every 10 just like your serial line example. However, 100baseT actually runs at 125MHz so you do get a real 12.5 MB/sec out of it.
Of course, if you really want to be picky about "LoC/sec" or whatever pointless measure the popular media has latched onto this week, you need to consider the overhead of TCP headers, whether or not you want to allow jumbo frames in your calculations, and so on.