IEEE Launches 400G Ethernet Standards Process 94
alphadogg writes "The IEEE this week launched a study group to explore development of a 400Gbps Ethernet standard to support booming demand for network bandwidth. Networks will need to support 58% compound annual growth rates in bandwidth on average, the IEEE claims, driven by simultaneous increases in users, access methodologies, access rates and services such as video on demand and social media. Networks would need to support capacity requirements of 1 terabit per second in 2015 and 10 terabit per second by 2020 if current trends continue, the organization says."
Re:Too fast (Score:4, Interesting)
It also remains to be seen whether the IEEE wants to go after some of the non-ethernet interconnects with this one, to try to get ethernet into use for larger-than-single-chassis interconnection of things that are usually confined to single boxes and 'internal' busses.
Your end user probably doesn't even need 1GbE; but his boring cheapo desktop probably has an 8(if 2.0) or 16(if 3.0) GB/s PCIe connector available for adding a graphics card. Hypertransport or QPI are faster still.
If one had the desires of people building larger-scale closely interconnected systems in mind, a very, very, very fast flavor of ethernet(with convenient ethernet features not generally available on internal busses, like the more sophisticated switching and routing capabilities); but enough speed to serve as an interconnect for a rack full of blade modules with virtualized storage and networking, or NUMA across all blades, or both, could be quite handy.
Such features have been available for a while in proprietary busses from the very expensive supercomputer outfits; but the IEEE may be looking to move in to that area with at least certain flavors of ethernet....