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from the they-are-just-using-extra-tiny-bits dept.
At the time in 2015, the 2.5G/5G standards were not yet ratified by IEEE. There were chips in the market, solely from Aquantia, for enterprise configurations that were happy to go with an evolving standard for their solution. From September 2016 this changed, and the standards have been ratified with Aquantia, Intel, Cisco and others all involved in the specification. Aquantia's earlier generation silicon adhered to the standard, and has been deployed in a number of enterprise backbone deployments to the tune of 5M ports a year. Today's announcement surrounds the launch of two new controllers based on the multi-gigabit standards aimed at more consumer level solutions – specifically 'client connectivity in enterprise, gaming and SMB applications'.
[...] For now, the AQtion 2.5G/5G controllers coming to market look to be a premium component, destined for high-end notebooks/PCs, and if the pricing is right, more expansive than the current array of 10G integrated options. One of the issues Aquantia will have, which they also acknowledge, is the switch problem that currently stops 10G being more widespread – the lack of consumer grade and consumer budget level switches. We were told that there are some enterprise models of 2.5G/5G switches currently for more backbone type of work, and it will be up to Aquantia's partners to spot opportunities in the consumer market. From a personal perspective, the switch side of the equation will be the slowest to change and be a defining aspect for the widespread adoption of this technology. We've seen this with 10G, or the fact that the Killer gaming NICs do not have corresponding switches/routers to assist in a number of features that might become irrelevant in a general network. Publicly Aquantia isn't stating which switch developers they are working with, and as before, leaving those companies to decide/announce their product lines, but I think the switch aspect will be more important to watch over 2017.
On performance metrics, Aquantia have told us that the AQ107 can achieve 9.5 Gbps in each direction in the 10G mode with a CPU utilization of 12-20%, and in 5G mode it can do 4.6 Gbps in each direction with 6-14% CPU use. Due to the higher clock rate of the controller, in 1G mode the controller is quoted as having has[sic] lower latency than standard 1G controllers. The AQC107, in 5G mode, will have a typical power consumption around 3W when in use.
Does anybody here need this caliber of Ethernet at home?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:55PM
No. I have 100Mbps cable internet and a wired 10/100/1000 LAN, even when downloading large files at full download speed the hard drives barely keep up. 5G/10G is overkill for home use unless you have the rest of the equipment able to fully utilize it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:05PM
5G/10G is overkill for home use unless you have the rest of the equipment able to fully utilize it.
10Gbps fiber to the home: check! [epb.com]
1.7GB/s SSD: check! [storagereview.com]
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:10PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:21PM
About all I can think of is Wireshark listening to traffic. That would be one HELL of a laptop with a 10gbs interface. Perhaps with 128GB of memory on board and a monster processor you could be monitoring traffic in real time, but then you need good memory management to mitigate the storage bottleneck. Maybe with a RAID configuration you could get write speeds up to maybe 1/3rd of the interface speed, but otherwise I can only see this working in memory.
The laptop offering makes no sense at all. I can see using it in a server environment with the right equipment supporting it, but not so much in small business or home setups either. A wee little bit past "prosumer" level here.
Firehose hitting teacups, indeed.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:29PM
It might be that now the GHz wars are over, the next differentiator for your gaming boxes will be Gbps?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @03:35AM
Well, framerate seems to have been capped at 60 fps and resolution to 1080p for a while now, pretty much for the first time I can think of after computers could meaningfully use higher res than NTSC/PAL. Now however there's 4K along with 2 more bits of color depth. If that weren't enough, here comes VR and suddenly getting a steady 90 fps and even 120 fps (eventually I assume) is needed!
My GTX 970 can do what's been released of Star Citizen at 60 fps 1080p at ultra detail just fine (cooling is an issue though since I never installed water cooling). Same with Fallout 4, just to name two recent games. While I'm sure certain game developers won't be happy until they're doing photo-realistic ray tracing in real time, the visual quality of both of those games is good enough for me.
Now, I don't have a multi-monitor setup so I'm sure I could get l33t points if I went with three monitors. That might show some limitations of my video card.
I have a feeling that VR is really actually coming unless the nausea thing is insurmountable. Graphics cards I think will continue to be a differentiator for gaming boxes.
So much throughput has very little utility for video games especially when the bottleneck is your ISP. Even at a LAN party that much throughput is unnecessary.
I'm not one of those gamers though that seems to have more money than sense. I guess I could see pointless dick-waving contests over Gbps once we all have hardware that can run the latest and greatest games at 120 fps for our VR headsets.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:23PM
You do need 3Gbps to run your live VC-2-encoded 4K 60p IP stream at broadcast quality.
I can sell you the boxes you need for that. Check with your SO if he/she doesn't mind selling a car or two to cover the expense. The "best doorbell webcam in town" prize is totally worth it.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:26PM
H.264 at 3840*2160 requires up to 3.5Gb/s. This would be useful for security cameras or televisions.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:35PM
I'm not sure I can live with the idea of my security cameras having the extra latency of h.264 or h.265.
Contribution networks prefer JPEG2000 or VC-2, and I can't have anything that's not the best.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:25PM
The cheapest SSD's now do 500MBytes/s read and write (which is 4Gbit/s).
By the time computers are coming with 2, 5 or 10Gbit/s interfaces, they will be able to swamp them all just using their primary storage. Let alone networking, other drives, etc.
It's a never-ending game of always having one component that's "slowest", and currently - on my networks - servers, storage, CPU and RAM are vastly overspecced for what we do, while Gbit networking is struggling (currently Gbit to the desktop, with 2 or 4Gbit LACP links on the backbone, and 6-10Gbit LACP to the servers / storage themselves).
Literally now all my client machines are 8Gbyte RAM with 250Gbyte SSD, with quad-core or more, the ONLY thing left is network capability.
Are we a huge business? No. Just a small school. But if you want to get shit done, and don't want to pay more than a few hundred pounds for the clients, and invest in the infrastructure, it's not long at all before Gbit networking is inherently limiting. A 48-port switch with Gigabit to the clients needs at least 20-30Gbit really on the backbone, we can't manage that. But with a handful 2Gbit / 5Gbit connections that we can aggregate, we can easily get there.
Currently 10Gbit is stupendously expensive. You can get network cards, you can upgrade the blade server units (their internal backbones easily support that speed already), but you can't just upgrade every switch to 10Gbit. But if I could get a handful of 2/5-capable ports, that's a lovely staging for an upgrade to 10 in the next few years.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday December 16 2016, @03:14AM
But at my secret compound (i.e., home office) I do things like transcode media files and compile software (the linux kernel alone takes over 20 minutes to compile) that really shows up the slowness of server, storage, CPU, even RAM. I would be happier if compiling or transcoding took no longer than, say, renaming a file. I have no overspec'd components, despite 8-core CPUs and SSD stripe sets. Everything is slower than I'd like it. There is PLENTY of room for improvement! Surely I can't be the only impatient one.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:14PM
5G means your 500 MB/s read/write SSD's can saturate your NIC, assuming the sender and receiver are both on a modern SSD. If only to move files across the network at drive speeds, I'd jump at it if it was only a couple hundred bucks.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:36PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:49PM
But ... the cloud, man, the cloud! Remote desktops in centralized VM server, there's your need for remote speed.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 15 2016, @10:59PM
Then again, we had the Intel Pentium(tm) >plink plink plink< in your local machine "to make the internet faster".
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @10:19PM
For home use, streaming media is the big one. Generally, you are going to need 100Mb or so to properly manage BD data rates. On a good day, I will see real world performance around 90Mb for Wireless N assuming all is right. Wireless AC is better but most people have terrible AP placement so you only do a bit better than N; I see 100 - 120Mb AC performance in a moderately busy environment with normal room obstructions. To get sustained data rates for 4k resolution streams and beyond, you are going to need multi-GB shared spectrum availability. It's like bringing Gb fiber to people's houses: most people may not need it today, but, 5 years from now, I'm sure it will be necessary to make some technology work.