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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: 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.