10-Gigabit Ethernet Standard Approved

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.

Comments

What an informative link.

[taliver]

Here's one that might be a little more informative. I leave the google link to someone else.

In meaningful terms

[Throatwarbler Mangro]

10Gigabit/sec = 1.25Gigabytes/sec

1 LoC (Library of Congress) = 10 Terabytes = 10,000 Gigabytes

That's 0.000125LoC/sec, or roughly 2.22 hours to transfer the entire contents across 10GigE.

Wow.

Re:In meaningful terms

[glwtta]

I thought the time honoured (and extremely relevant) measure of LoC/s has been officially replaced with HG/s (Human Genomes per second)? Mostly because it allowed for a lot more flexibility in making up figures that don't really tell you much, if I remember correctly.

Re:In meaningful terms

[psychos]

This is incorrect. Low speed serial interfaces do tend to use a start bit and a stop bit, but higher speed interfaces generally do not.

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.

Its not fair!

[GnomeKing]

*looks at his 14.4k modem*

*looks at the article*

*looks at his modem*

*cries*

With this annoucement

[SkyLeach]

It should be obvious that to burry copper is completely obsolete. Per yard, fiber should be cheaper to manufacture and bury.

10Gb speeds should be enough for anybody, so start building the infrastructure now and leave the telcos in the dust.

Will they do it? No. Why not? Because they think that they should bury the copper/fiber hybrid cable that they have been burying and come back and do it again later.

Burying cable is the most expensive part of telecomm.... retards.

Copper vs. Fiber

[jandrese]

IIRC the original Gig-E hardware (if not the original spec) was Fiber only as well. Eventually people started coming out with copper hardware to save on costs. In most cases, the only real advantages to fiber are the long cable runs and the immunity to interference in noisy EM environments (like your typical computer room). The downside is the cost.

Re:As if 1000BaseT didn't suck enough CPU cycles

[Enry]

There was an article in the Linux Journal a few months ago (February issue I think) that talked about intelligent network cards. They had an onboard XScale CPU and its own OS and TCP/IP stack.

What would happen is the OS (Linux) would get intercepted at the socket layer and pass the data to the network card. The card would then handle the process of building the packet and all the remaining layers of communication.

This allowed for a high amount of main CPU time left over for actually doing processing while the network card CPU was focused on handling the TCP/IP packet work. IIRC, you could saturate a 1Gb line with data at only 5% main CPU usage.

Re:Hit me with the clue-stick please!

[GigsVT]

revcom

IEEE

Consider yourself hit with clue-stick.

Re:not obsolete

[questionlp]

The highest speed PCI-X (64-bit @ 133Mhz) is capable of reaching ~1GByte/sec which is just about the speed of 10 Gig Ethernet. There was/is the promise of Araphoe (sp?) that resembles AMD's HyperTransport but would be used for expansion cards rather than a chip-to-chip pathway.

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:not obsolete

[monkeydo]

Please put down the CCNA study guide and back away slowly. Ever since the invention of switches most people haven't had to worry about collisions. We're talking about full duplex, 2 hosts on a collision domain. In other words no collisions. If you are getting collisions on GigE or switched FastE you are doing something very wrong.