Where's Our Terabit Ethernet?

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.""

Comments

but but but

[grasshoppa]

we LOVE our standards. Without standards, where would we be?

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

[milsoRgen]

Metcalfe says that the current approach being taken in the standards bodies won't get us to terabit rates. So, without going into too much detail, he said he expects a technology revolution, during which proprietary and innovative approaches to Terabit Ethernet will rule, at least at first. He said he sees it as an opportunity to "break loose from the stranglehold of standards and move into some fun new technologies." Ahhh, the struggle to stay relevant I suppose. Especially considering this guy has one awards from IEEE, a standards body. It almost feels he has an axe to grind from that short statement, at least in regards to the process perhaps. But then again he is a venture capitalist, perhaps he is laying down some good press for some startups he might have dumped some cash into? Also he has had some incorrect predictions before, my favorite being Windows 2000 would crush Linux.

Who needs it?

[mollymoo]

One terrabit per second is roughly:

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?

Front-end handler

[davidwr]

Who says the CPU has to handle all the load.

You can design your hardware so the CPU only gets interrupted when it needs to.

If you have a smart front-end processor, you can have the front-end processor bundle up IP- or insert-your-own-protocol packets and send them to the CPU as needed. Heck, if it's really smart it can even handle entire TCP streams on its own. Imagine only interrupting the CPU when it had the results of an entire HTTP GET request in hand. Or imagine downloading your favorite movie and having the front-end processor do all the work, shoving the data to RAM directly and alerting the CPU every MB or so.

Hmm, come to think of it, didn't the Internet begin with front-end processors or dedicated devices the size of a large refrigerator?

Re:Misleading name, "Ethernet".

[plague3106]

A dog stepping on a cable sounds like a more "permanent" run. I wouldnt worry about the dog for the occasional guest. Besides guests are what 802.11 is for...

Re:ethernet and collisions

[TeknoHog]

Wikipedia says: "10 Gigabit Ethernet abandons half duplex links and repeaters (and the CSMA/CD that goes with them) in favor of a system of purely full duplex links connected by switches as was already the normal practice with gigabit Ethernet."

Re:I will Settle For 1Mbps

[ivan256]

Spend 5 minutes troubleshooting.

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.

Re:Stranglehold?

[waterlogged]

"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"

Media Access Control and Logical Link are Layer 2
IP is Layer 3
TCP is Layer 4

Geek card....give it here.

Re:For those of you playing at home, a TB is

[TubeSteak]

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 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.

Re:Stranglehold?

[KublaiKhan]

Physical layer is level 1. This covers the hardware--the cables and interface cards that would need to be modified to operate at the Terabit rates, and which is the primary concern in this case.

Layer 2 will be involved, of course, but the primary difficulties in this endeavor is going to be layer 1.

Re:Long Time

[hraefn]

Seven years is closer to 25 million blinks. Which is about 115 days with our eyes in the process of blinking.

Does this mean that four percent of our lives pass in the blink of an eye?