Slashdot Mirror
Cheap Gigabit Ether
Avrice writes "National semiconductors gigbit ethernet is backwards compatible with existing systems and smart enough to fix your wiring screw ups for only $95. Maybe bandwidth (at least on the network) won't be such a problem after all."
If you read the kernel mailing list, you'd see the reports of people pushing 115MB/s+ TCP file transfers from hot cache with 2.3.x softnet on sk gig cards.
Zipp. Linux is the only OS currently that can saturate gige on a single host.
100MBit/s == 12.5MBytes/s (not including the overhead and other stuff). Uncompressed video is 22MB/s. The Newtek NT video toaster, which only costs $2995 works soley with uncompressed video. So to do a transistion in realtime from channel A to channel B, means you needs 44MB/s of sustainable bandwidth. And since NT video toaster is not limited to just two video streams, you could easily be working with 3 or 4 video streams.. that will suck up all the bandwidth PDQ. (Thank God for dual-loop fibre channel ;p ).
the lowest bandwidth considered acceptable for video broadcast is 7MB/s, which is already getting close to saturating a 100Mbit ethernet connection. And, even if you only use the network for storage and use a local scratch disk, copying 30 minutes of compressed video footage is going to take 20+ minutes. Copying 30 minutes of uncompressed video is going to take about an hour.
Fibre channel is nice for video editing because you can get all those 7200rpm seagates located nice and far away from the control room. 16 hard drives sitting next to you does not make the audio editing easy. Plus with dual-loop fibre channel, you can get 200MB/s sustainable transfer. Which means, you can work with several video streams on one computer, one computer can be digitizing footage, and another computer can be used to send the digitized footage back to 3/4", all off the same fibre channel SAN. Course, that setup will run you about $25,000. (not including vector scopes and all the other crap you need to run a video studio)
If you don't have to run over copper, you can already get good gig-ethernet cards for under $300!!
Do a search for the netgear ga620
>In fact, i even have to switch my Cable TV box off at night, becuase of the PSU "buzz" it generates.
:-) The one you have has loose windings (ie, it is technically broken - but probably won't ever fail completely... just get louder)
You need to get a new transformer for the Cable TV box...
Unless you have some electronics skills, you will want an Electronics Technician to install it for you.
Huh? At least one major ISP uses Gigabit Ethernet already in the core. Everyone else is using ATM or other optical stuff that's at gigabit speeds already. What are you talking about?
re: C++ vs C
You wouldn't give a stick of dynamite to a little kid would you? Then why would you give C++ to someone who is going to abuse it in ways that make maintenance programmers have nightmares?
ATM is dead as a high speed protocol -- people got sick of its complexity. It will continue to live on in the POPs because of its use as an aggregating layer for DSL and cable modems, but everything in the core is going Packet over SONet with MPLS switching. Believe it.
Some hubs will segment off the collision domains between 10, 100, etc and do layer 2 switching between the two.
That's a good thing. Let the 'dozers keep needing higher specs, and the rest of us can ride the cheap/fast hardware wave.
Do you think that things like 40GB hard disks and Athlons would be affordable if it weren't for the fact that 'dozers need that stuff?
1000Base-T = wire speed of 100MB/sec but you'll probably get 20-50MB/sec with all the ms or TCP/IP overhead.
So your "I can get 160meg/sec with another 7 drives" is already over 3 times faster than your 1000Base-T network.
ooooooh primero
Sorry, I was just quoting somebody else, who seemed to have done the experiments.
Anyway, fact remains, you have to copy to memory, tell the processor, and copy to the second card. A switch is designed from the ground up to do this quickly, a computer is not. Sure, you can hack it, but it's not the best.
Of course, you can do the complete-graph thing anyway, and forget about switching. Though it still would be pretty hard to crank out 3 gigabits/sec of data, unless it's directly from memory. According to you, on a good PCI bus, this should be feasible.
I got my information from reading a book at Barnes & Nobles which talked about differing standard. The reason 1000baseT requires a DSP is that there is no "recieve" or "transmit" pair - Each pair is sending 250mb of info to the other side, so the DSP has to do noise cancellation (Dual Duplex). 100baseT uses one pair to transmit, and one pair to recieve (Full Duplex). Which got me thinking. How would I make myself a 1000baseT crossover cable...
PAM5 is only used on 100baseT2/1000baseT. It has 5 different voltage levels to drive the signal across the wire. PAM (the technology) is used by V.90 (instead of QAM on V.34), but it's used only to drive the D/A converter on the PSTN, not to send the PAM signal itself to your modem.
>And what if one of the middle machines is switched off?
:-)
Build it into a star/ring topology. Very fault tolerant. If you use bridging, as far as I can tell, you can basically use Ethernet like Arcnet (which IMHO, rocks ethernet anyday, other than the pathetic speed)...
>On 100 Mbit ethernet, a crossover cable will usually only give you 10Mbit.
:-). I have a link between two computers with a crossover cable running at 100 Mbits right now! And it has a SOLDER connection splicing two cables together! And yet, STILL the WINDOWS box can transfer to my Linux box at about 40 Mbits.
That's fresh! No, really, you are not saying the truth (I hope - does your cable suck? Worse than mine?
Unless you get decent harddrives and SCSI parts (on both ends), you aren't likely to find it easy to max out a 100 Mbits ethernet connection (that's about 9 Megabytes a second... that is fast!).
good point Jefferey but I want to point out that most people will not achieve 533 MB/sec unless they have a zero wait state device. . . other wise they get the stand 266MB/sec if they are PCI 2.1 comliant.
Remember, this chip is only the tranciever (usually called phy). You still need some sort of MAC to control it. Gigabit MAC chips still ain't cheap.
Still, all things equal, this will be a lot cheaper than fiber gigabit -- the optics alone on those boards cost > $300.
Oh yeah, and it DOES work on normal Cat 5. Up to 100 meters. I done seen it, maw!
-Anonymous Coward who works for a Very Large networking company...
Not only is it real, but expensive. Until the 15th, www.dotster.com has $15/year domain reg's.
A hub effectively joins cables together, without messing with the signal at all (other than degrading it). 8 10 BaseT computers joined to a hub may as well be 8 10 Base2 computers. It makes no difference, the hub repeats all signals. If you are using a hub, then yes, you will slow the entire 100 Mbits network down by using a 10 Mbits card.
:-)
A switch, on the other hand, "inspects", "rewrites", and "routes" (they are in quotes because they don't really do all of what a computer does in this, but most of the functions are avaliable, including sometimes firewalling!) all the packets that come through. This means that a 100 Mbits card will only slow down when communicating to a 10 Mbits card. And this isn't physical slowdown, this is a sort of "resistance" applied to the switch by the slower card. Just the same way there is "resistance" when you communicate through a gateway to a host over the internet (I'm assuming you don't have a T3...). Otherwise, the network performs at its best. Actually better with a switch, since two hosts communicating directly to each other over the same switch don't tie up the network for other ports on the switch. Basically, switches are cool, hubs are cheap.
YAY IM FIRST MOTHERFUCKERS!!!! READ IT AND WEEP!
he's too stupid to be a typist.
When you get up to gigabit speeds, most servers are CPU bound. However, the newest, fastest boxes can really push the PCI bus hard. I've seen roughly 700mbit from a standard 32-bit, 33MHz PCI bus.
In 64-bit, 33MHz slots, we've seen over 800mbps.
In 32-bit, 66MHz slots (rare), I've gotten gigabit wire speed.
We've also hit wire speed in a 64-bit, 66MHz slot. (Duh. No shock there.)
However, the situation is more complex than just server speed. If you have a 10/100 switch with one gigabit port, it's likely that your limiting factor is your switch backplane. To really get the benefit from gigabit ethernet, you need a balls-out fast server and a balls-out fast switch.
Oh yeah, and an efficient OS. I know I'm going to piss a lot of people off, but I am resolute in my belief that the fastest PC-based server OS out there is not NT, not BSD, not Linux, nor any other OS that has an x at the end of the name.
Here's a clue: it comes from Provo, Utah.
-Anonymous Coward who doesn't work for Novell, Inc.
Good news! The domain gignic.com is available!
You are a marketing genius, Murphy
Anyway, by this time next year we all should be able to replace out 100bts for less than $100 each.
Being a tad dense/nitpicky? ppl r refering to the pci bus on the majority of pc's which is 32bit 33mhz. & it's not 133 but 128 or such from some overhead.
Well if youd have been at gibcon 99 (200player lan) you would know. They had rows of about 16 computers each row with their own 10mbps hub. They had gigabit backbones etc, all rigged up by "network engineers" and it still wasnt fast enough. Basically the network couldnt handle 200 people all playing quake at the same time. As if that wasnt bad enough.. people started trading warez across the network, congesting it even more so. We need terrabit!! :P
um, no. gigabit nics can be had for $290 so boards based on this new cheaper chip shouldn't be more expensive.
I make cables all the time for in-house use. A cable tester costs about $20. It's just a matter of crimping connectors onto a cable... no big deal.
GHz or not, the cables are hardly magic. Anyone with the proper tools and the teeniest bit of skill can terminate almost any type of cable or fiber.
I work for a large company that does lotsa chip design. Our designers often create multigig dump files. We use gigabit ethernet cards (fiber) on lots of our simulation/design machines simply because transferring this amount of data constantly really slows down the design process. Think about a large dump disk being shared my many sim servers-- you need bandwidth that 100mb ether just doesn't supply. We use Cisco switches (Cat 6000/6500's), which support gigabit ethernet just great.
If you read the new O'Rielly unix backup book Curtis speaks about tests they did regarding Gigabit ethernet. My numbers should be basically correct here.
As this was a book about backups they were measuring the speed they could get using Veritas Netbackup.
The server was a Sun E450 with 4 CPU's.
The client was a sun E10K with only 8 or so CPU's.
They found that they were unable to get any more than around 200MB/s when doing backups, and about 300MB/sec with the machines totally maxed out.
The reason given? Too many interrupts per second were bogging the CPU's down. Apparently the Alteron (sp?) cards just jumbo frames which REALLY helps (less packets= less interrupts).
Comments?
or does Hemos look like Max Headroom? Either way, Hemos is a jack o' lantern jawed jackass. Hmmm, that was alliterative. Maybe I should be like a writer or something.
thank you.
im gonna kill you you fucking irish mick paddy fuck!
Try "gigabit ethernet". Thanks.
You are being a bit anal :)
that's the lesser-known "eat-her-net"
Yes, NatSemi does not make any cards, just the chips. The *chips* will be available for $95 each in big batches. The cards themselves will be produced down the road by our friends at companies like 3com or intel; they will sell the cards for upwards of $300, most likely... most computer chips/components are relatively cheap, sometimes just a couple of dollars (I belive that NE2k compatable chips are available for about $.75 these days?), but the end product comes out to be much more (NE2k ISA card: $20). So with NatSemi making the only chip like this, and the high demand, they can charge anything that they want for it and someone will end up buying. When competition comes (I bet 3com will make a similar chipset!) then the price will go down and we will all have gigabit ethernet in our houses. And we will be complaining that its too slow. Damn kids. -- jason
I don't know what crack yer smokin.....
You CANNOT support SMP without a multithreaded kernel anyway.....
By definition: if the kernel can only run as a single-thread, it's Asymmetric Multiprocessing A La the old Macintosh Multiproc machines.
This article only refers to the TRANSCIEVER. This does NOT include the CHIPSET (e.g. Alteon, Intel etc.) or the card itself. The transciever controls the physical interface and has nothing to do with the chipset. For example you can have a NE2000 compatible ethernet card, one which ships with a transciever for 10base2 and the other for 10baseT - same CHIPSET, different TRANSCIEVERS. What this means is that Gigabit over CAT 5 is still WAY expensive - more so than even the fiber based cards. (Moderators, please moderate this one up.)
Asymmetric.
SYMMETRIC == shared everything.
NOT THE SAME THING.
A $20 cable tester will tell you if you crossed the wires. NOT IF YOUR CABLE CAN HANDLE GIGAHERTZ TRAFFIC.
I work at major manufacturer of microprocessors. When we ask, "Is this cable bad?" we DON'T hook it up to a continuity tester, we hook it up to a test rig that measures impedance at the operating frequency in question (1 to 2.5 gigabits). At these frequencies, its feakin' voodoo trying to keep the signal from radiating off the wire like an antenna.
Sure, you can make ethernet cables REALLY INEXPENSIVELY, but gigabit over copper is going to give people fits.
Perhaps you should take a look at how gigabit really performs and where it should be used compared to 100BaseT before you heathens get all wet and wonderful about it.
100mbit ISA cards are sold for compatibility reasons -- there's no way you are going to get anywhere near optimal throughput on that machine, and what you do get will take 99% of your CPU.
Although not the exact same chip, check the date on this press release. About a year earlier and less money.
Because I think you are losing something in translation.
Yes, I know Linus doesn't like threading for threading's sake (a la Java with its non-blocking I/O) but to implement a kernel without multi-threading sounds pretty outrageous.
They aren't running full duplex. It's called Dual Duplex using PAM5x5x5x5 encoding. And the encoding didn't come from V.90, it came from 100baseT2 (PAM5x5), which you never see nowdays.
-Starfox
Why, yes, there is.
Unfortunately, Anonymous Cowards don't have a subscription, as is painfully obvious in our posts.
Open Source Nerd Lingo!
Actually, using FreeBSD and zero copy TCP drivers, I've seen 750+Mbit/sec from 32/33 on a 450Mhz PII. So, it can be done with good software. :)
would be interesting to see what it is doing with the extra pairs of cables. i thought CAT5 spec left the end pair open, and switches are supposed to just pass it through. this is letting some voice over ip technologies power their telephones by sending some AC voltage over those two wires (eliminates need for external power source and cable hassles) If this thing is sorting out which pairs in your cat5 cable go where, i bet it could be bad if it 'picks up' a live wire and fries its self. of course, i think supplying power over a network cable is generally a bad idea with existing technology anyhoo. just my 2 cents.
Yeah, but that is my question... This is for two years. So the price is exactly that, $15/year. I didn't know they were so cheap anymore.
Of what are you speaking? Do you know how to make a crossover cable? Particularly the issue about matching the twisted pairs?
You can DEFINITELY get 100Mbit just _fine_ with a crossover cable, assuming that you know what you're doing.
If you'll notice, all his comments about C/C++ are straight from the standard fortune database.
I quote: "C makes it easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes that
harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup"
So we can conclude that Signal11's idea of "research" is reading the fortune files late at night.
Hardly surprising.
Well, 100baseT padded the preamble to 10x that of 10baseT in order to compensate for the 10x increase in speed. The same couldn't be done for 1000baseXX, so a "usable" collision domain for that standard was like 5m.
Conclusion? CSMA/CD sucks.
-Starfox
like my Osborne, it was cheap back in 1982
it's an expensive space takerupper now
Using TCP/IP over ethernet, PC class hardware maxes out at ~30Mbs. If you don't believe me, check out the Network World article in the 7/5/99 issue ). Even an HP-UX N class server could only push 762M bit/sec (http://www.nwfusion.com/news/1999/1101unixfeat.ht ml). Kinda sad, isn't it? :-(
Using TCP/IP over ethernet, PC class hardware maxes out at ~30Mbs. If you don't believe me, check out the Network World article in the 7/5/99 issue.
Even an HP-UX N class server could only push ~750Mbs.
Kinda sad, isn't it? :-(
are still irish! fuck you savage papist! did you get drunk and beat your wife today yet? here, have a potato! fuck you!
Did anyone happen to read the adapter's product PDF? The second page states that the adapter should not be used in life support devices of any type "without the espress written approval of the President of National Semiconductor". Strange. Damn lawyers think of everything in advance nowdays...
Dell's 2400 and 4400 series Servers have 64 bit bus channels, running at 66 MHz.
... b B b -
l
Some higher-end servers are configured with 2 or 3 peered PCI bus channels (528 MB/sec each).
So those machines have the capability to pull a RAID controller for everything its worth, and push it out a Gigabit Ethernet card full throttle.
For servers with 2 GB of RAM, burst rates could be saturating the 1000 Mb/sec.
Big B little b
B Byte
b bit.
For a Terminal Server attached to a Database, a gigabit card in each with a simple X-over cable (no Gigabit hub expense) could improve performance dramatically.
BTW, did you see the 3Com NICs with an Integrated encryption chip?
gratuitous plug for 3Com:
Available for desktops, workstations, and servers, 3Com EtherLink® 10/100 PCI NICs with 3XP processor offloads network and encryption processing to deliver revolutionary performance and security.
http://www.3com.com/products/dsheets/3cr990.htm
Couple onboard encryption with Gigabit?
Paul
I'm being a bit anal here, but you can of course connect more than 2 computers with a crossover cable, assuming you don't mind installing multiple ethernet cards in at least one system.
:-)
Yes, but if you use a computer as a switch, latency will kill you. PC buses aren't designed for shipping lots of data from one card to another quickly. Plus, as someone opointed out, PCI buses max out around 130 MB/s, so 65 from, and 65 to memory (can a card transfer to another directly?) (1 gigabit ~= 125 MB/s, assuming no headers/full network usage, etc.)
Of course, what you could do is have a complete graph of point to point connections. 3 computers = 6 cards, 3 cables. 4 computers =12 cards, 6 cables, and it grows quickly from there. And good luck finding a computer than can fill up 3 1-Gigabit pipelines
OTOH, it might be useful for clusters, etc.
If you are only interested in point to point connections, you might as well use SCSI for a LAN. Or even something like firewire (What's the top speed on it?)
Anybody who thinks they can make their own cables is NUTS. Unless you have a cable tester, you're inviting yourself a world of hunting for that ONE bad cable in your WHOLE network.
I used to work in SHF communications. Gigahertz is not the realm to be Mr. Shadetree mechanic.
SLASHDOT IS FOR CIVILIZED DISCOURSE KEEP IT CIVIL YOU CUM GUZZLING GUTTER WHORE EAT SHIT AND DIE MOTHERFUCKER BE CIVIL GOD DAMN YOU SAVAGE BEAST BITCH
National semiconductors gigbit ehternet is backwards...
I know artists have gigs and comedians have bits...so...is this some kind of new musical comedy? Or does someone have such an old computer that they've never heard of a gigAbit?
IC, UC, AC
Sure, it'll fix my wiring screw-ups... But will it fix me pancakes?
- A Ninja
Check it out
I am planning to register a domain name and host it one of the companies. I am not able to decide where to host.Does anybody have good expreciences about the hosting companies. I am primarily looking for unlimited bandwidth with space of about 20MB and good support. One of my friend recommended CI Host and WebHost.com. Any suggestions Thanks.
As someone pointed out earlier, most (fast) disk drives are about 20MB/sec. I think the fastest spec I saw was around 30MB/sec. (Note I'm talking about real transfer rate and not bus maximum). So you get 30MBsec == 240Mbit/sec.
Even looking at SCSI bus maximums, it isn't until Ultra/160 SCSI does your SCSI channel exceed your networking.
Right now I'd be surprised if a single system could saturate a gigabit ethernet link doing something 'real'.
The real reason to buy gig ethernet is for connecting your switches together. The only reason to buy gig ethernet NICs for your home system would be because it isn't that much more expensive so you might as well have it in case you need it.
from whatis.com:
AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port)
See the graphics part? I wonder what that means. Oh well, must be irrelevant, let's put the chip on the AGP slot anyways because.. well, because it's faster, right?
Yes. But *why* is it faster? Because it isn't shareing bandwidth with the PCI cards on your system. PCI video cards used to be fast too - until people started plugging in thier network card, SCSI card, sound card, mocap card, radio card, TV card, whatever in it. Until we move to an entirely new bus (soon please Lord, your children are waiting..) we will have the problems of putting all the cards on the same bus being a bottleneck. Do you *really* want to see your nice new fany TNT2 slow to a crawl because it's fighting for space on the bus with your gigabit card? sounds like a nightmare from hell to me.. or was I thinking about M$..
(note: not Christian, merely sounded good at the time)
just out of curiosity, what's the source of your information for your posts?
Is there a magazine called "just enough lingo to make the stupid people think you're smart"?
Ethernet does NOT fall apart at 30%! That's an old wives' tale. Even on shared media, you can get ~97% bandwidth.
And on a switch, in full duplex mode, you get essentially the whole pipe.
Check out: http://www.res earch .digital.com/wrl/publications/abstracts/88.4.html
No, gigabit ethernet for LANs doesn't help much. The supporting technology (hubs, switches, etc) is still prohibitively expensive, as are systems that can make effective use of it. The biggest problem today isn't LAN bandwidth; it's Internet bandwidth and the prohibitive costs associated with it. It doesn't help if I can set up a gigabit LAN for -- TM, watching crucial bugfixes trickle in over $CHEAP_UNI's dogslow link
It's pretty common that cat 5 wiring above drop tile and under floors is not completely compliant. The standard specifies more then just a quality of copper, but also the bends and contacts that have to be used.
Let's see how many installations fall over when they're pushed.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
I want it, I want it, I want it!
:|
:)
Even if I don't need that much bandwidth, maybe prices will drop because of this. I'd love it if we had a link like that to my dorm, but it's not going to happen, I'm sure.
Oh, and... you reallly could build a beowulf cluster with this. Faster links help out much more than faster processors for many classes of problems. Sorry, but it's true!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Cheap gig, great. More support for and old conecpt in networking. I just wish there was more support for a certain networking technology which would in turn help another related project. Instead we see a lot of progress in gig because its easy. Throwing bandwith and a bunch of buffer space in a switch is a crummy way to do QoS.
Aside from the ATM vs. Gig rant, this really doesn't mean a whole lot. Yeah LANs are fast, this isn't news to anyone. I don't see anyone complaining about the network performance on their desktop at 100Mb/s switched. So whats the deal? The big step forward in networking is when we can see something that gets close to the performace of atleast 10Mb/s to residential and buinesses that doesn't cost a small fortune.
You have a good point there. The PCI bus (Ala PC architecture) is capabel of 132 MB/Sec max.
32bit @ 33Mhz == 132MB/sec
Which would mean that if you would never be able to hit 100% utilization in a standard PC.
On the other hand on a PCI-X bus (64bit @ 66Mhz) it would be quite nice.
Umm, no. You need another controlling chip on there besides, not to mention all that other icky NIC circuitry. $95 for the chip will probably translate into $400 or $500 for a NIC. Hubs and switches will probably be Way Too Expensive.
Ahh,
usually (I haven't looked at a license agreement in ages) you're ok as long as you've got enough licenses to cover the number of simultaneous users. You may or may not have to implement a license management system (i.e. users are actually locked out from using the app if all licenses are used)
This is still going to be pretty pricy. The 95 dollar price tag is for a chip, not for a PCI board. Add in engineering and manufacturing costs and the price will put it beyond casual "Ooh, I've got a gigabyte network in my house" costs.
There are even cheaper pure 1000baseT chips out there. The only really noteable thing about the National Semiconductor chip is that it can talk down to 10/100 base T.
You'd have to purchase enough licenses to cover your users to make it legit. One copy of MS Office or Windows wouldn't cut it.
I'm not sure what the business or technical justification would be for serving VMware in this manner. From a zealocy standpoint, sure, you get to say "We're a Linux shop" but there would be no real technical merit to it or probably even a sound business case.
You still need N Windows licenses, and M licenses for your applications plus a license for VMware (maybe N of these too) and a beefy enough server to handle it.
It is true that the 33Mhz 32bit PCI bus maxes out at ~132Mbytes/sec (33 mil 4 byte transfers per second, or 132 mil bytes transfered per second). It is also true that many devices don't handle one transfer per cycle, esp at the begining of a burst. It is also true that burst sizes are quite limited. Lastly it is also true that almost all PC machines with PCI buses have the 33Mhz 32bit PCI busses (plus the AGP "bus" which is pretty similar to the PCI bus).
There are 64bit PCI buses. Lots of current generation SPARCs have them. Some of the older Alphas (and the newr ones) have them. There is a 66Mhz PCI bus. In fact most PCI buses that arn't 33Mhz 32bit PCI busses are both 66Mhz and 64bits wide. It's not hard to buy them. I think some of the high-end very expensave "server class" PC machines even have them. But it ain't common. (and yes a 66Mhz 64bit PCI bus should move something like 533Mbytes/sec66 times eight is 528 after all).
Still if you pick a PCI bus at random from the world odds are better then 1000 to one that it is a 33Mhz 32bit PCI bus.
Indeed it is. But it is also unlike it. A LVD-SCSI disk seems to cost pretty much the same as a non-LVD SCSI disk. A LVD-SCSI controler (~40Mbytes/sec...or is it 80? I think 40 "narrow", and 80 "wide") costs maybe four times as much as a plain old "Fast SCSI" controler (~10Mbytes/sec). A "plain old" PCI motherboard costs almost nothing. Under $100 easy. I doubt you could find a motherboard that does 64bit 66Mhz PCI for $400, or even $1000.
In short I agree that there is a faster PCI. I agree that that makes it clear what the migration path is. I disagree that it is very relivant in a discussion about a $90 consumer PCI card, at least not this year.
True and not true,
I have gigabit, using fiber, to a realy great switch, Performance to the 100 Mbit workstations is OK; I know that the poor server, was weezing when only 100Mbit, and now the server rarely gets over 10% cpu utilization.
The Disks are what is holding it back now (I think). now one of my Linux boxs has fiber too, and when I transfer files between it and the server, then it groans a little. I always thought the Yellowfin card was a little suspect, or maybe the NCP tools, I am not sure and of course the workstation don't bother it either.
The thing is Gigabit is nice, Gigabit is fast, but most certainly not a cure all, faster hard drives lots and lots of a faster kind of RAM and MUCH faster bus would be a much better cure.
Sorry about the tangents.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
...someone sends a stack of them to Yahoo! to deal with their bandwidth issues? Or maybe Ebay? Or while we are at it, Slashdot could use them...
Anybody remember that weird proposal about renaming the prefixes for binary orders of magnitude because they are not based on powers of ten as the original Kilo/Mega/Giga/Tera prefixes "were intended"? They wanted to make it stupid names like Kebi/Mebi/Gebi/Tebi instead.
Imagine: It could have been Gebibit Ethernet. (Would that have been Geh-bee or Gee-bee?)
Hey! Reading fortune files late at night *is* research, dammit. I resent your slur; just because he's trawled the digital bible don't assume he's representative of the type. I'd refer you to the book of CRM7 but I can't be bothered to grep it.
I'd have to agree with another poster - the signalling on ethernet is not like SCSI where you can have multiple devices communicating at different speeds - you have to run at the lowest speed or you get collisions, data corruption, and other nastiness. Plus the card may not even work because it can't get a link "beat" from the hub. Very bad - you NEED collision detection.
I run a 100Mbps lan at my house, and it's a star topology. I can atest that the most data I ever pushed was ~8Mpbs over a long period of time ( say a few hours ). My PCI tv tuner pushes said data over my 66Mhz PCI bus to the netgear 10/100 nic to another netgear nic of the same model at full duplex.
I'm not the guy that figures up numbers for what it *should be able to do - I test. For moving streaming video I never get more than said ~8Mbps -- would gigabit ethernet help someone like me? I mean my bus must be too slow to push all that data over a 100Mbs connection already. Also, would a ppro ( socket 8 ) with ~8 PCI slots make a good gigabit "hub" for a star topology or would it crush the machine's bus bandwidth?
I think ill pick up a few cards, and be the first to have a gigabit router at work. (Running linux baby!)
Oh wait, no drivers. (; Nah, hopefully they ship with card..
So, would the $95 chipset translate to initial real world prices of maybe $150 a card?
And, just how do these things work with existing systems. Say I've got a network with 2 of these cards, plus a humble Linksys 10Mb NE 2000 clone card. Would the gigabit cards talk to each other really fast, but slow down only when talking to the NE2000 clone? Or does the entire network run at 10Mb when the NE2000 is on it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
http://www.broadcom.com/docs/PR990511.html
...that's its just the chip, right? $95 per 1000 of 'em. After design costs, board production, company overhead and profit, etc. etc., you'll probably be paying $400 a pop for a card.
Uhhhm, thats just the readers submission.. note the Quotations, right? see them.. that means its a Quote.. gee, go figure
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
On 100 Mbit ethernet, a crossover cable will usually only give you 10Mbit.
Turn off autodetect in the driver settings, and explicitly set it to 100Mbit, full duplex.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Somewhere around, I have a three port Farallon dongle-hub that does this. (Two ports 10BT, one port Mac AAUI.)
Since the Farallon unit was pretty cheap when it was in production, I always thought it was strange that more hubs don't autodetect a crossover cable. Nice to know this might become a standard feature.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I remember that a lot of problems cropped up when trying to do 100Mbit Ethernet on existing wiring, which only barely could manage 10Mbps. What will happen to most of the wiring already laid out. Will it have to be thrown out? I remember hearing about a Cat-6 cable. Will we have to upgrade our networks?
Also, anybody got information on how collision handling is done on this new architecture? I would suppose that, being a gigabit ethernet, it would surely see much more usage than a 100Mbps one, and being also much higher speed, there should be more collisions.
If ever, but when such cards will be available at near '100mbit' prices, then who's to say that a low-cost setup will not be made with a PC with four of those cards in it, acting as a router, switch, or hub.
Sure, the theoretical max of 133MBps of the PCI bus is low for a switch backplane for 4 1gig cards, and the latency will not be a winner, but it will beat a 100mbit switch in quite a number of circumstances.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I need some of these... anyone seen these for sale online?
Quick thing to clear up, they are selling the chip for $95. In bulk. That means that if a motherboard manufacturer decides to integrate it into a motherboard, it will add $95 to the cost of the board. And that actual gigabit cards will cost much more. (Heck, the Intel 82559 10/100 chip costs only about $30 by itself, but a NIC that uses it costs around $150!)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
But what if I want to render on the server? That would sure prevent most sorts of cheating!
They put 250 MBPS on each of the four pairs in the CAT-5 cable.
Why would your network only be slow in January? ;->
Err, 500 mbits/sec on each of the two send pairs (the other two pairs are for recieve)
If you want a nice whitepaper/technical document on gigabit over copper/802.3ab you could do a lot worse than to check this out.
-- O improbe amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis!
Sure, you can get a fairly inexpensive gigabit ethernet card, but how much is the hub gonna cost. You can only connect 2 computers through a Null Cable (cross over).
You're not going to get hubs for this stuff, you're only going to get switches.
As far as I know, no vendor currently has a 1000BaseT product out there, so it's difficult to say exactly what the cost will be. But, for comparison's sake, the SuperStack II 9000SX, which is an 8-port 1000BaseSX (short haul multimode fibre gigabit) switch, retails for about £10,000, which is approximately $16,000.
Which means that this stuff isn't going to be 'string it around the bedroom for the Quake deathmatch' fodder for a few years to come.
-- O improbe amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis!
On 100 Mbit ethernet, a crossover cable will usually only give you 10Mbit. I assume the same will be true with gigabit. You probably won't get full speed out of a crossover cable.
I'm not sure what you're talking about; there's no good reason why a crossover cable wouldn't give a full speed connection between two 100Mbit/s NICs.
I've managed networks with plenty of 100BaseFX inter-switch links which are not much more than glorified cross-over cables, and had no problems at all.
All that a hub does (well, this isn't strictly true on newer hubs, but...) is repeat the signal; if anything, you should get faster speeds out of crossover cables, as you can run them full-duplex.
In fact, using a crossover cable should be even faster than using a switch in pure performance terms, as there's no switching delay.
What's the technical basis of your assertion?
-- O improbe amor, quid non mortalia pectora cogis!
Well, gamers don't really need bandwidth so much as they need low latency. Generally 10Mb is more than sufficient; the only real advantage is that 100Mb cards potentially can deliver the (small) packets a bit faster.
It is true that game companies may start using much more bandwidth, when it's available, but I don't see that happening much anytime soon because they also want Internet gaming to be possible, and over the net it's not really common to get 100Mb.
Businesses can start playing around with stuff like videoconferencing I guess.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
This is misleading, this chip is only a PHY (physical interface) and needs another chip called a MAC (Media access controller) to function as a NIC. It would also need transformers for electrical isolation and the RJ45 and PCB, probably a whole bunch more little stuff as well. Just for comparison a 100/10Mb PHY is about $5 in volume right now (probably less) and most solutions for 100/10 are now integrated into a single chip that sells for less than $10. We are a LONG way from gigabit at home!
ya.thats a micro$hit solution. if it doesnt work, throw hardware at it until it does. this isnt a bad thing however. its given us cheap and powerful hardware.
hehehe.. I guess he forget to use the 'Preview' feature :)
Pete
Hello,
:)
Here is my idea. As someone here pointed out, the PCI bus maxes out somewhere just around 100mb/second of bandwidth (I've somewhere about an extension, PCI-X or something; anyone know anything about this?)
My idea is why not use the AGP bus for something like this? I know that AGP is a lot faster than PCI. I guess the only problem is that most PCs today with an AGP slot use it for their graphics card (prehaps this is a reason to introduce motherboards with multiple AGP slots
Maybe this is totally unnessecary and the PCI bus is fast enough to provide the 128mb ('b' as in byte) a second speeds of a Gigabit Ethernet.
Maybe no one would actually need to this one of these networks at that extreme high speed. But what if these types of speed increases continue, I believe it might be plausible.
Could anyone hear with more knowledge in the hardware aspect of things comment?
Pete
Hello again,
I really wouldn't say I have a complete understanding of network cards work, but would the fact that AGP devices can directly write to memory be of help in a network of this speed?
I'm mainly thinking here about the potentially needed on-board buffers. Or is this not a consideration, and the data is just off loaded over the bus in time for the next packets?
Just another thought...
Pete
Well first the $95 is only for the Chip, so it will have to be assembled into a NIC, which will raise price a bit (still way less expensive than what is currently available).
:)
About hubs and switches. If I understand the press release right, their chip is pretty much a big DSP, and can/will be used with NICs, Hubs, Switches. Of course the main probleme for GigSwitches is the backplane speed, just try and imagine the internal speed of a 24port GigSwitch (24x1000MB = Arghh ! ).
But I think the main problem we will see around is for implementation in current networks. Because I remember reading a while back about the lack of "true" specs for Cat5. Mostly, that you can find Cat5 in different copper diameter. And having a lot of different "brand" of Cat5 on the network may be quite a pain to diagnose the problems.
Still it's pretty impressive that they were able to nudge 40m more into the specs.
I'm really looking forward to getting GigNICs and good street prices.
Murphy(c) - Nope My name isn't openSource
Seriously, I've used FoxPro for Windows running with Novell and saturated a 100MB backbone with only 40 users, back in 1995.
Yes, we need more front-end piping, like full-scale DSL (1440), but an overtaxed server is no fun for anyone, especially with old apps that don't execute server-side but push all the bits across the Network.
This is good news, $99 for Gigabit Ethernet - we need more of this!
Will in Seattle
...has been using gigabit ethernet for some time.
(8-DCS)
FreeBSD.
(8-DCS)
I'm being a bit anal here, but you can of course connect more than 2 computers with a crossover cable, assuming you don't mind installing multiple ethernet cards in at least one system.
;)
Ooh! just like a tokenring, what fun.. Talk about single ring of failure
EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
And what about latency? And what if one of the middle machines is switched off? At least, back in the good ole days with coax you only had to worry about uplugged/unterminated cable, and not about switched off machines.
$95 a chip in quanity translates to at least 4 or 5 times that for a card. However, thats still about half what gigabit cards currently cost. It will be another year or two and more price drops and maybe we'll start seeing them on desktops :-)
Spyky
Search for gigabit on www.pricewatch.com. The Netgear gigabit (based on Alteon Tigon II card) on Fiber is only $291. The 1000TX cards are shipping now to select vendors from Alteon, which should end up being cheaper once Broadcom gets more chips out in volume. The Netgear uses the same Alteon driver in Linux as the 3com gig (again the same chip). In order to run two PC's back to back at full duplex gigabit would be two of these NIC's and an SC-SC fiber cable.
The 64 bit gigabit cards can be put into a server with a standard 32 bit slot and still function, albit at a slower speed. Yes, they support 64 bit 66mhz systems, but will run in your standard Celeron 466 with 32 bit 33mhz PCI also. In addition, the gigabit cards support interrupt coalessing, which allow processing to be done a lot more efficiently than with standard NIC's, especially when dealing with smaller frames.
Good luck getting a NIC with this chip in it to work in your PC. PCI 2.2 only supports bus speeds of up 264MBytes/sec if your lucky. To run a Gigabyte card on a PC you would need a motherboard that has a chipset with the PCI-X spec. Try finding a motherboard that supports the PCI-X bus specification . So until these MB come out, this new chip will only find use in HUBS, switches, etc...
I got the impression from the article that the price is for the chip (in quantity), not a card.
The cards might endup being much more expensive...though I have no idea what the other components might be.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
At the moment, I can't think of any uses of Gbit ethernet except inside server clusters. To really get the best of something like this for anything other than 2 machine networks, you need gigabit switches, obviously, and these are still rather expensive.
The first usage that springs to mind is supercomputing, but then, how many centres with enough power to saturate 100Mbit ethernet but a tight budget do you know of? The big limiting factor will usually be CPU, I would guess.
100Mbit is easily enough for studio quality video, which would be the other big bandwidth hog.
Its still jolly clever, I just can't think of any uses. But then, I said that about 486s...
Yes, we have just started looking at SAN's and got sticker shock big time with the proprietary vendors. Then I started digging into what SAN would provide, and my first thought was - It's just a dedicated data network - a private NFS/XFS for the servers to use. I'm sure the SAN vendors will claim they add value through robustness and failover - but they also add that little glitch of proprietary implementation that attempts to lock you into their product line. An earlier article in Network Computing - may last fall, quoted a large university or governemnt technologist (maybe NASA) - he was not impressed by the capabilities of the vendor solutions over the private data network approach. He went so far as to say that even the standards work on SANs was not going to be very useful in the near term of two or three years after it's finished. Plan 9 from Lucent/Bell Labs (whatever) is looking better all the time - thin clients, compute server, data servers, mobility, robustness, and an excellent pedigree. Of course I also like the idea of Beowulf + XFS-based-SAN + GbitEnet - no wonder IBM is hot on Linux.
Every change is not progress, but there is no progress without change.
To put things into perspective, National's own DP83843 chip, which does the same thing for 10/100 Ethernet, costs $5.50 in small quantities. A 10/100 MAC chip cost around $10, so we'll probably see $150-200 prices quoted for gigabit MACs... I doubt we'll see gigabit Ethernet cards under $500 this year.
On the other hand, previous transceivers cost over $250, so things are getting better... just look at 10/100, where a year ago you would pay $500 for a 10/100 8-port hub, today you can find a 10/100 _switch_ for under $150... probably next year gigabit prices will be at nearly this level.
Then I got DSL.
Granted that high speed connections should be cleaner over fiber and (the dreaded) PPPOE should be able to handle whatever medium.. waiting for the phone and cable companies to implement it would be a very boring span.
This is something that has already been done. Look at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/levy/gms/ for more information. It is really mostly a matter of latency rather than bandwidth. You can have network latency that is smaller than the time that it takes your local disk to seek.
You actually turn your machine off?
Scratches head Why? http://www.uptimes.net
marotti.com
Just daisy chain with bridging (they have should have bridging in Linux, its OPTIONS BRIDGE in FreeBSD) and all you do is go in to one, out to the next. Just like running a three player quake game with two serial ports. (back in the day)
Of course this does require two 1Gbit NICs for all but the end machines...
marotti.com
scsi harddrive average 10meg/sec.. my U2W 7200 baracudda 18 gig maxes at 14Meg/sec if I'm lucky... but on a RAID with 7 drives I can get 80meg/sec for the 32-bit SCSI card.. up that to 64-bit scsi card I can get 160meg/sec with another 7 drives.... (naturally speed is faster with faster RPM drives but that's like a 1mec/sec or 2 faster) so for one server to even max out a gigabit NIC you need in the neighborhood of 10 to 14 U2W 7200 drives. not to mention a few megs of scsi adapter cache and a few gigs of main memory to give the RAID a rest every now and then :)
-- Jason...
Hey, that's funny! I'm not being sarcastic. Just wanted to congratulate whoever posted that and thank them for making me laugh.
IIRC gigabit ethernet on tp cables isn't possible on cable lengths of more than like a couple of yards. So could anyone explain how they plan on solving that problem?
Mikael Jacobson
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I remember talking to a guy who didn't buy my 76 mazda from me. They were expecting to release it in a year. I think the problem is that you are going to be near 100$ a port for the switch costs but if they can make a nice switch .... oh yeah! I'm all over this!!
he who has the fastest cart always has the best lie.
I wonder who will buy more, business for their use, or gamers? Let's face it, who doesn't want one. Now we have to wait and see how much the final product is going to cost. Also I did not see anything about drivers or the like. The other big question is getting a switch for one that doesn't cost more than the computer... Anybody know a good switch to go with it???
Most likely, we'll be seeing cards in the $195 range or higher. And of course, hubs for $500 and up.
As for the auto-wiring feature, this is nice, what I see this meaning is the you can use a non-crossover cable between two cards and it will work.
Every good gigabit ethernet adapter I've seen takes a 64 bit PCI slot to connect to the motherboard. I have seen very few motherboards, mostly Xeon and Alpha oriented, that have 64 bit slots. Not only that, but in any network size larger than 4 systems or so (which is pretty silly to be using that much bandwidth with anyway), you need a switch to give you the advantages of speed. Check any networking catalogue you like, but I sure haven't seen any plain old hubs that supoort 1000Mb/s.
So you need a switch, and you need 64 bit PCI. This is not stuff to be using on your 1337 overclocked dual celery 466 system that is maxed out to the gills. Gigabit ethernet still requires hardware that puts it in the "Professional Use Only" catagory. Hopefully sometime soon the entrance costs will be less prohibitive, but untilthen, I'll stick with my 100Mb/s ethernet with adapters for $25 a pop and hubs for $50. --------
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
"People ask us why we did it...what possible use could anyone have for Gigibit Ethernet?", said National Semiconductor exec Ben Dover-Freely. "Well, an anonymous donor in Redmond subsidized the project, citing the need for more bandwidth to handle the volume of por...er...stockquotes he needs to keep abreast of the market and keep a firm hold on the economic issues close to hand. A masterstroke of innovation, if you ask me. I'm glad we could rise to the challenge and provide a hardcore solution to most pressing problem."
-- WhiskeyJack
I'm being a bit anal here, but you can of course connect more than 2 computers with a crossover cable, assuming you don't mind installing multiple ethernet cards in at least one system.
This could be great for a SAN. SAN technology is still in it's infancy. Gigabit technology is more like an extension of current technology while SAN is still in standards wars. It is very easy to buy SAN equipment from different vendors and your HBA won't talk to my device unless someone gets a firmware upgrade. When was the last time you thought about that when you bought a network card or a hub, 1988 or so??? Your post also supports my assuption that network storage will continue to be one of the fastest growing segments in technology for the next few years. In a few years we'll all be using data storage devices that aren't on out local computer/PDA for important data. It won't matter where you are or what OS you use. You'll log in and all your really important files (formatted in XML, HTML, or Plain Old Text) will be available for your immediate use. On the question about XFS allowing different hosts to low level sector read and writes, my read of what SGI is releasing seems like a yes. I would also bet more appliance devices show up that also do this. -timbu2
Several people have pointed out that this is not a NIC, it's a chip. But there seems to be some confusion still. This is not a single chip 10/100/1000 Ethernet solution, it's just a physical layer tranceiver. Any design using this Phy would still need a 10/100/1000 Ethernet MAC controller, and those cost quite a bit. $95 for a Phy is not going to bring about sub $200 NICs, not even close.
Even if the users don't use the sofware at the same time? Licenses that restrictive should be illegal [in my oppinion]. The benefit of a server is to eliminate Windows-Linux dual boot on every machine and replace it with just VMWare on one machine. (but with 10mbit that can suck.) Without a solution like this you can never be sure if a machine with that pesky-windows-only-app will be free.
A. Wait
A. wait.
Hmmm...Maybe they are based on the old NE2000 design, that would make the architecture what? 25 years old now and still in use? Ugghh...Now who would do something like that, I mean to reuse the same architecture over that long of a period. Good thing Intel doesn't do this. Oh, wait, they do... But seriously, Gigabit on the cheap will be nice.
- The cards are likely to cost $300 or so before too long.
- The cards for the switch are $300.
- The switch itself is $1800 with five cards with 8 ports each of 100bT/10bT autosensing, full duplex. There are five slots free. (This is the procurve 4000M.)
So if you have, say, five machines that you want on gigabit, this particular solution would run you $4800, and you could hook forty more machines up to the 100bT. The $4800 is the switch, fully loaded, and five of the gigabit nics. This would nicely solve the networking needs of most colocated server setups with a couple database servers, a couple file servers, etc etc."You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, gigabit (and 100b, 10b...) ethernet refers to the raw number of bits you can spew over the wire. It includes all preamble and postamble.
Time to update your crash course. Gigabit Ethernet uses all 8 wires and a form of encoding/compression to achieve its speed.
you are, however, correct in terms of 10bT and 100bT networks. :-)
1024/8 == 128MB/s
My ATA hard dive bursts up to 33MB/s (13MB/s sustained).
Perhaps it's most useful when used in confunction with a busy file server.
I say the entire market should drop copper based products and go 100% fibre optic. Start massively mass producing it to jack prices down and make it cheap enough to have in the home.
And while they're at it, replace all phone and cable networks (to our homes) with fibre too. It'll be necessary if we're ever to have the massive multi-media "global village" corporations like so much to advertise about. Some of us are still on dial-up, dammit.
Phone and Cable corps. could get together (it'll be a cold day in hell) and split the cost for this, then compete for our business over shared lines.
Do I know what I'm talking about? No. But it sure as hell would be nice.
-kidlinux.
It is a bit like saying SCSI maxes out at 10 MB/s. It is not generally true.
-jwb
Here's a thought: How about informing the user their network admin #$@!'d up the wiring and refuses to run along with a detailed description of WHY it doesn't run. We should not be letting things like network wiring be done improperly ... it leads to sloppiness and ignorance.
This is something I've been thinking about for a while. How fast would a network have to be before it becomes faster for one system to swap to another's physical memory than to a local disk?
:)
Heh heh...my roommate better start paying close attention to his memory usage...or it might start disappearing
The best part is, with these chips you won't even need the null cable. Just use a regular patch cable, and the chip will fix the "wiring mistake". Kind of cool. Now, if only the auto-negotiate doesn't suck...
As a quick guess. I expect to see them come out at about 3-5X the chip price till one gets over 10,000+/Month volume productions. The prices will drop to about 2X. Companies need their profit.
Actually, apart from the fact that token ring works rather differently (it relies on a virtual token being passed from host to host), this could be arranged in a star shape to, provided you have enough pci/agp/whatever slots.
They quote the transcievers (CHIPS) at $95/ea in quantities of 1000...
This is not at all the same as saying the *retail cards* will be anywhere near that price.
As such a new thing, it wouldn't surprise me if the cards were hundreds of dollars..
Boy, isn't that the truth. We use roaming profiles here where I work, and our network is S-L-O-W as molasses in January.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
This is four wires we're talking about here, not a programming language.
Crash course in network wiring:
1. There are two possible types of twisted-pair Ethernet cables: 1) straight through (for connecting a card to a hub), and 2) crossover, or null (for connecting 2 NICs together, this is the same thing as crossing over Rx and Tx to allow two DTEs to communicate)
2. This new chip can automatically detect which cable is being used, and set itself up automagically. Now you can use both correct types of cable interchangably. Eventually (hopefully), we can simply just buy straight-through cable all the time, for all situations.
This also makes upgrading from a PC-to-PC network to a hub network very simple as you won't have to completely recable.
It's more of an interoperability thing if you ask me.
According to the Gigabit Ethernet group draft standard IEEE 802.3ab, Gigabit copper 1000base TXshould run on all decent Cat 5 installations.
It does this by running single duplex over all four pairs at 125 MHz. The coding is changed to increase the number bits per symbol from 0.8 to 1.25. Simple wiring screw-up like mixing-up tip & ring are already handled by most 100baseTX ethernet transceivers. But crossover-vs-not isn't, and split pairs are unfixable.
Your Cat5 working 100baseTX is supposed to run 1000baseTX just fine. But it won't if you've left pairs unconnected, or stole them for a second run or phone. Poor crimping might also hurt.
That said, the real question is what you can do with all that bandwidth. Most hard-disks cannot sustain even 10 MB/s that 100baseTX provides. And it's hardly a high spped internet solution. It only runs 100m from the hub. The real problem with internet has always been interbuilding: the last mile between cable heads and user buildings.
RCN is doing just this. They are laying fiber out to people's houses... I think the only copper part is between you and the box, and a single box only servers some 100 homes. I believe that each box gets 12 pairs of fiber.
:b
They are going to provide a single solution for everything - TV, phones, internet, etc. It is expected to be very very fast.
I know this because they bought the company I was working for last summer (an ISP here in the SF Bay Area) and this is what they told us. But don't worry, they said it's fine to tell the world.
IIRC, this service is going to be availible here (in the bay area) as well as in the Boston area.
On 100 Mbit ethernet, a crossover cable will usually only give you 10Mbit. I assume the same will be true with gigabit. You probably won't get full speed out of a crossover cable.
I believe the top speed for the firewire spec is 400 Mbit. I'm not sure if all devices, or ports, support 400 Mbit, but that's what's in the spec.
Also, the EV6 bus for the Athlon is 200 Mhz, with separate switching for RAM and PCI. I wonder if that might be a good solution.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Actually, U2W tops out at 80MB/s. That's a limitation of the SCSI bus, NOT the PCI bus. And throughput tends to be non-linear as you increase the number of devices on a SCSI bus. I've seen graphs of some controller tests as the number of drives increased -- most controllers started to suck at 5 drives. (Of course, this was several years ago -- long before U2W, LVD, U160, and fiber channel.)
The advantage of 64bit/66MHz PCI is for hardware (read: very large cached) RAID controllers [the Mylex extremRAID 3000 comes to mind] and multiport Gigabit ethernet cards.
I want.
Seriously, Cheap Gigabit ethernet could really help out in the office setting. With Buttloads of server space, you could actually implement those roaming profiles on NT, for instance, without clogging your network to bits.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Finally, something I can actually say "Wouldn't it be cool to build a Beofwulf system with these puppies!" about... :-\
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
This type of low cost high-speed connectivity could bring the benefits of a SAN (Storage Area Network) architecture to those who can't afford a FibreChannel based system.
The storage server can be based on PC architecture with a stripped-down linux kernel, emulating FibreChannel over gigabit ethernet. It has no notion or filesystems, users or anything like that - it is optimized to just ships disk sectors to the network at maximum performance.
The application servers can be diskless or use their local disks only for swap and caching. One ethernet interface will connect to the internet and another will support access to the SAN. Replacing or upgrading such servers is easy when they store no state information.
XFS is capable of letting two or more systems share access to the same disk at the sector level.
I don't know if the linux port of XFS will support this feature, but assuming it does this could be very useful for this kind of applications.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Sure, you can get a fairly inexpensive gigabit ethernet card, but how much is the hub gonna cost. You can only connect 2 computers through a Null Cable (cross over).
(First?)