IEEE Releases 802.3ba Standard 141
An anonymous reader writes "EEE announced the ratification of IEEE 802.3ba, a new standard governing 40Gbps and 100Gbps Ethernet operations. An amendment to the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard, IEEE 802.3ba, the first standard ever to simultaneously specify two new Ethernet speeds, paves the way for the next generation of high-rate server connectivity and core switching. The new standard will act as the catalyst needed for unlocking innovation across the greater Ethernet ecosystem. IEEE 802.3ba is expected to trigger further expansion of the 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet family of technologies by driving new development efforts, as well as providing new aggregation speeds that will enable 10Gbps Ethernet network deployments."
Stuck (Score:2)
You'll still be stuck on 3Mb/512kb DSL.
Re:Stuck (Score:5, Informative)
You know networking exists outside of the internet, right?
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Tell that to my router... 20Mbps/1.3Mbps
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Tell that to my router... 20Mbps/1.3Mbps
Verizon FIOS here, my basic bundled rate is 25 Mbps/ 25Mbps. I could opt for faster
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I have 10 Mbps downstream, but still the same 512kbps upstream...
This Has A Use Already (Score:2)
Much welcomed tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Either way 1Gbit Ethernet is beginning to feel a bit like a bottleneck with storage and other bottlenecks being removed.
It'll take some time between ratification and cheap D-Link switches...
Re:Much welcomed tech (Score:5, Informative)
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It's interesting how this will increase the adoption of iSCSI storage, yet the original reason to go to iSCSI will be lost since fiber cables will have to be laid.
That seems a tad disingenuous. The real reason for iSCSI was a
Microsoft price structure that made a network file service very
expensive unless it went in through the 'disk-on-SCSI-bus'
back door.
Linux and iSCSI was a way around the high cost of
a MS server/client system. None of the Linux-only or Macintosh
network systems were so encumbered, and worked
quite well without any iSCSI.
Re:Much welcomed tech (Score:4, Informative)
It's interesting how this will increase the adoption of iSCSI storage, yet the original reason to go to iSCSI will be lost since fiber cables will have to be laid.
That seems a tad disingenuous. The real reason for iSCSI was a
Microsoft price structure that made a network file service very
expensive unless it went in through the 'disk-on-SCSI-bus'
back door.
Linux and iSCSI was a way around the high cost of
a MS server/client system. None of the Linux-only or Macintosh
network systems were so encumbered, and worked
quite well without any iSCSI.
WTF are you talking about? Why was this modded up? Is it just because he's saying something negative about Microsoft?
I've worked in Microsoft Windows server environments for a decade, and I've never heard of SCSI specific MS licensing, or any kind of special licensing at all for file servers.
While it's true that a Linux server in general is cheaper from a licensing standpoint (hard to compete with free), that has nothing to do with iSCSI, SCSI, or FC.
The reason iSCSI is popular is because it's simpler to set up, halves the number of ports and switches required for a fully redundant server environment (minimum 2 ports and 2 switches vs 4 and 4), it has real authentication instead of the worthless "zones" crap in the FC world, provides user friendly names instead of numeric IDs, has encryption, 10Gb Ethernet can outperform even 8Gb FC, and even old 1GbE switches can perform adequately if port trunking is used properly.
What this all boils down to is that iSCSI is both better and cheaper than FC. Once popular SAN arrays from big vendors start to appear with 10GbE iSCSI as standard instead of an expensive "option", then FC will start to die a rapid and well deserved death.
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Hey man, don't ruin this amature linux admin's fantasy with real world experience, that's just cruel!
MS licensing is obscene, that's for sure, but they've never tied anything to the hard disk. It's all installs, users, and CPUs, with variations for each category.
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The performance numbers are very different and so are the technologies, Microsoft filesharing is file-level and iSCSI is block level. It means with an iSCSI card, the machine can treat volumes as local disks and install any OS.
Secondly, you're confusing iSCSI with NFS. NFS has been freely available even back on Windows NT4. However it was not created to counter Microsoft, it was ALREADY there.
iSCSI until recently has been the only technology that provides
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Block level makes it possible for the server to not have to know anything about the data, so the client can host encrypted data on the SAN, or boot from the SAN, or both. Or use a filesystem the SAN has no idea how to inspect, etc.
Also, it's not extreme latency. It's a few tens of microsecond latency in a small network with OK switches and 1GbE, which iSCSI targets as a market. Tens of microseconds in still two orders of magnitude less than the latency of a disk seek, so for spinning disks, you're not going
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Block-level storage can and does completely replace local harddrives. Thats the reason for bladeservers, where blades have everything but harddisks. They're given volumes of fiber channel, iscsi or fcoe to become their local virtual disks. NFS or CIFS would be completely useless to them without first having block level volumes (except for the rare case of Linux/FreeBSD installed on NFS).
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I think 10 gig ethernet has been an option for a while now. I'm almost positive one of the sales droids spouted something about Equalogic shipping 10 gig iSCSI SANs.
AFAIK, most small-midsize organizations engaged in iSCSI SAN also do virtualization and thus don't have a ton of hosts to connect so the fiber part is less of a pain than it might seem given they can still get the "IP" part of iSCSI and leverage cheap and still useful 1 gig connectivity elsewhere.
Plus 10 gig can do copper. But there won't be a
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It's interesting how this will increase the adoption of iSCSI storage, yet the original reason to go to iSCSI will be lost since fiber cables will have to be laid.
The spec includes 40Gbit and 100Gbit over copper via twinaxial cables, so you do have to make new runs of cable but you don't have to take the fiber hit when you do. Cat 6 definitely won't cover it though, I'm afraid.
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More ads faster! (Score:2)
Re:More ads faster! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but the porn was low-res and slow to download. So it's a double-edged sword.
C-64 porn (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but the porn was low-res and slow to download. So it's a double-edged sword.
Still, I think you're underrating the merits of the slow reveal... I mean, as the image file was loaded byte by byte onto the computer's memory, filling the display with that lustworthy graphical data, gradually revealing more and more, until you had a naked woman on your screen in 320x200 glory, 1bpp plus 4 bit colors, foreground and background, per 8x8 character cell... The five minute wait for the elusive delights to be laid plain was like a striptease...
And when I say 5-minute wait, that's how long it took to load an image from disk. Modem would take longer. :)
Re:C-64 porn (Score:4, Informative)
The image format changes the strip-tease.
BMP loads from the bottom-up. It's Sir Mix-a-lot's favorite format.
Progressive JPEG gets less blurry as it loads, simulating being drunk at a strip club.
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and yet in probably 5-10 years even 100 gb/s will probably not be fast enough.
Re:More ads faster! (Score:5, Funny)
For end users, 100gb/s is almost 'enough'. It's just a hair short (about 2.5x) of the speed needed to stream uncompressed video at the highest resolution anyone is likely to seriously consider, at 240hz. Once you hit that point, you just remote your applications to wherever the data is, and forget about moving data ever again, assuming, of course, that the data is close enough to you to avoid any latency issues for interactivity.
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What about stereo? Multiple users?
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Stereo is covered by the 240hz. But the multiple users .. yeah, for a family of 4, I suppose you might want to multiply by ... 4.
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yeah, for a family of 4, I suppose you might want to multiply by ... 4.
I think you're still fine. It would be fair to use something like REDCODE Raw [wikipedia.org] as an upper limit for home viewership at 10GB per minute. It actually costs more to process uncompressed video these days, so nobody would put money into such silicon.
Presumably for deployed stereo they'll come up with a 'joint-stereo'-like algorithm that doesn't duplicate the data-rate.
And a good LDS family can used a bonded pair.
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uncompressed video? 240 frames/second?
I'll assume you're joking and making fun of the crazy videophiles who think something like this is necessary. So well played, good sir.
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240hz is needed for stereo 3d at 120hz. 120hz is the upper limit of detectability for about 98% of the population. 60hz is choppy for almost 30%.
My point was just to figure out roughly where you could guarantee that not even the videophiles would be unlikely to complain about the quality, and 120hz is generally well received by videophiles, and unfortunately you do have to multiply whatever rate you pick by 2 for stereo 3d implementations.
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My point was just to figure out roughly where you could guarantee that not even the videophiles would be unlikely to complain about the quality, and 120hz is generally well received by videophiles, and unfortunately you do have to multiply whatever rate you pick by 2 for stereo 3d implementations.
Being a videophile isn't about actual perception, it's about being superior. It's a dick measuring contest with specifications. Give them a maximum perceivable specification, and they'll imagine their way out it.
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Please post your math...
240 hz * 1920 px * 1080 px * 24 bit = 11,943,936,000 bit/s = 12 Gbit/s.
Seems to me that you could watch multiple 1080p uncompressed videos at 240 hz at 100 Gbit/s.
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240hz *
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hi-Vision [wikipedia.org]
7,680 * 4,320
* 64 bit (not 24, you don't want to have to lose accuracy in blend)
= 509 megabit. I was actually off by a factor of 4 because I thought the 8k format was 4x2, not 8x4 before I double checked. So, sorry, it's actually worse than I thought!
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Even with Gigabit and 10:1 wavelet compression you're pretty much dandy. 10gb I think would be good enough with adequate compression.
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Compression is horrible for a lot of content, so videophiles will insist on uncompressed for some applications.
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it's never safe to assume that there is a "good enough" ceiling of bandwidth, for personal or enterprise use.
I know you specifically went for "end users", but honestly? this stuff is also geared at corporate. Think about it. Do you really need a SC/ST when you can replace it with ethernet? Eventually as things get higher in speeds along with better storage it enables more people to host servers themselves. what is enterprise now becomes home user. Easy examples: home theatre pc's, p2p/bittorrent, more comp
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My point was merely that there is a concretely definable point at which, barring latency issues, you no longer need to send data to the end user, and can instead remote the output losslessly, and do the processing wherever the data lives. This is at most one order of magnitude past 100gb/s.
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Yeah, others pointed that out ... as I responded there, you probably want to use some small multiple to allow for multiple streams.
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Re:More ads faster! (Score:4, Informative)
I would rather have the adds and my 15Mb line, then my old 1200 baud connection to compuserve.
We only use 300 baud for internal stuff.
In 10 minutes I can down load some porn, whack off, and be a sleep in 10 minutes. In those days it was hours just to get a 5 second clip.
what..TMI?
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In 10 minutes I can down load some porn, whack off, and be a sleep in 10 minutes. In those days it was hours just to get a 5 second clip.
Hmm. I could write that the above is an example of how user contributions on a site like Slashdot can offer recommendations to the average reader that are both informative and practical. On the other hand, I could write something to the effect that what you wrote provides more information than most of us asked for, or want.
I suspect both of those are too subtle, so I'll
Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
I just finally upgraded all of the connections in my house to Gigabit Ethernet, you fucking clod you!
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Sorry to break it to you, but... [wikipedia.org]
Disc speeds (Score:2)
I can't help but wonder what you could actually use 100Gbit/s for, I mean to the best of my knowledge (which is not all that vast I admit) you'd be hard pressed to find a storage unit that can handle these sorts of speeds.
Re:Disc speeds (Score:4, Interesting)
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Another thing to consider is that "100Gb" is also a measure of bandwidth. While a switch might be able to handle 100Gb, it won't be able to handle 100Gb to every port at the same time. Even on a 12 port switch that is less than 10Gb per port. That is still a lot of bandwidth, but you can obviously predict how it will degrade as the port count increases.
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That was his point.
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European internet exchange points (IXP's) such as LINX and AMS-IX are eagerly waiting 100GE. There's only so many 10GE interfaces you can aggregate together between large chasis-based switches.
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Interlinks. Router to switch, switch to switch, ISP to ISP, etc.
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SSDs are going to hit 6 gbit/sec in the next year or so. Multiply by 17 devices on a SAN and you're done.
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SSDs are going to hit 6 gbit/sec in the next year or so. Multiply by 17 devices on a SAN and you're done.
Those are consumer grade devices. Many SSDs are already well above 10Gbit speeds, and I fully expect 20Gbit in a single PCI-e card this year or early next year. Just 5 of those could saturate 100Gbit!
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True, though many a small business has a SAN built on consumer grade devices. My point was exactly that the low end will be pushing up against this limit all too soon.
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The interconnect will be 6Gbit/s and the highest interconnects I've seen commercially used are bonded 4 * 10Gbit/s (40Gbit/s) mainly for redundancy and latency. At 50MB/s (400Mbit/s) you'll need at least 100 of them to fill the bandwidth - enterprise SSD's don't sell for $200/32GB, try $2000.
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I'm not sure who you're replying to ... I didn't say anything about pricing. And even consumer level SSDs are already at 250MB/s, not 50.
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Delivering 100 Mbit/s Internet to 1000 people before over-subscription seems like a nice application. Unless you're in the US in which case it probably covers New York.
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Just depends on what you consider a "storage unit," and what you are willing to pay for it.
If "storage unit" means a hard drive, then no.
If "storage unit" means a big box in a data center with room for hundreds of drives, then yes you will be able to find interesting uses for this speed ri
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Look up Storage Area Network, and Trunking.
There is never, ever a such thing as "too much bandwidth". You're just thinking too small, that's all.
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If it was needed "NOW" it would be getting manufactured and sold NOW. It's not. It's just now getting standardized, so the hardware can be developed, and come out at a reasonable price a few years in the future, when it will in fact be needed.
We've had 10GBit ethernet for quite some time now, and yet the cards still cost $1,000 a pop. So if you could find a use for that much speed (and many do) you might find the cost proh
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Thanks for the link. That's the cheapest I've seen 10Gbit, but that still leaves infiniband cards of the same speed at 1/5th the price.
I'm listening. Infiniband switches and routers are widely available, and cheaper than their ethernet equivalents. Similarly, IPoIB has been around for quite a while. In fact Infiniband was designed with substantial similarity to IPv6 in mind, and can transport IPv6 packets natively
About Time! (Score:3, Funny)
I've been waiting to connect to my 8M Cable modem with 100GE for a while now. Finally, no more bottleneck!
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I've been waiting to connect to my 8M Cable modem with 100GE for a while now. Finally, no more bottleneck!
The inter-router links that connect your CMTS back at the headend might, eventually, be 100GE. 100GE would be about 12K customers at full blast. With reasonable oversubscription ratios, figure the headend for a small city, or "a major portion" of a large city.
100Gb/sec (Score:2)
That's:
9102 full 3.5" floppy disks (1.44MB)
18 full CDs (700MB)
1 full DVD (8.54GB)
Every second, with room to spare (I just counted complete transfers).
Of course I'm still waiting on 10g to be affordable for LAN use and barely get 10m to the WAN, so I'm sure the various **AAs aren't afraid of this for now.
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That's:
9102 full 3.5" floppy disks (1.44MB)
18 full CDs (700MB)
1 full DVD (8.54GB)
Every second, with room to spare (I just counted complete transfers).
CD and DVD capacities and transfer rates are measured in metric units, and 1.44 "MB" floppies are a combination of one metric and one binary measure (1.44 "MB" * 1024000 bytes/"MB"). Still, 8 bits per byte, so 100 Gb/s is 12.5 GB/s.
Using the correct units, I get:
1 DVD
17 CDs
8477 floppies
Consider a 1.44 "MB" floppy is defined using two different definitions for a kilobyte: a 1000 B/KB and a 1024 B/KiB factor.
(1.44 "MB"/floppy * 1024000 bytes/"MB" == 1474560 B/floppy; / 1,000,000,000 bytes/GB == .00147456 GB/f
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CD and DVD capacities and transfer rates are measured in metric units, and 1.44 "MB" floppies are a combination of one metric and one binary measure (1.44 "MB" * 1024000 bytes/"MB"). Still, 8 bits per byte, so 100 Gb/s is 12.5 GB/s.
Using the correct units, I get:
1 DVD
17 CDs
8477 floppies
Consider a 1.44 "MB" floppy is defined using two different definitions for a kilobyte: a 1000 B/KB and a 1024 B/KiB factor.
(1.44 "MB"/floppy * 1024000 bytes/"MB" == 1474560 B/floppy; / 1,000,000,000 bytes/GB == .00147456 GB/floppy; 100 Gb/s * 1B/8b == 12.5 GB/s; 12.5 GB/s / .00147456 GB/floppy > 8477 floppies/sec).
I used the following capacities in my calculations:
3.5" Floppy: 1,474,560 bytes (11,796,480 bits)
80 minute CD-R: 360,000 sectors at 2,048 bytes each (Mode 1) = 737,280,000 bytes (5,898,240,000 bits)
DVD+R DL: 4,173,824 sectors at 2,048 bytes = 8,547,991,552 bytes (68,383,932,416 bits)
Our discrepancies in numbers seem to come from the fact that I did my math lazily using Google Calculator and queries such as "100 gigabits / X bytes". Google uses the binary meaning of 107,374,182,400 bits as the value for 100
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Yeah, but how many Libraries of Congress per Fortnight? (LoC/Fn)
Go for it, math boy! Show us what you got!
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6,032 LoC/Fn.
Shame about the MTU (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Shame about the MTU (Score:4, Informative)
Jumbo frames, dear boy. Jumbo frames.
Which have been around since 1Gb ethernet.
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When are we going to get uber frames though?
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Pardon my ignorance (Score:2)
But are we talking about 100Gb/s over copper or fiber?
-Rick
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You can run it a very short distance with fat copper cables, but almost everyone will use fiber.
Re:Pardon my ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
But are we talking about 100Gb/s over copper or fiber?
-Rick
Fibre and short-haul (~10m) copper, at least for the current standard. Historically, there's usually a lag of several years between a new Ethernet standard and a 100m copper version.
I'm a bit sceptical about folks who say they'll never be a copper version, because I've heard that tale often enough before. I confidently predict it will be the Year of Linux on the desktop before it's the year of Fibre to the Desktop.
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Twinax isn't too big, it's the bundle of 10 twinax you need to run 100gbit that are huge.
I'm a little confused, though. Cat6 is capable of 10GbE, so why not bundles of 4 and 10 Cat6 for the standard as well, instead of just twinaxial? I recognize you'd need a special port setup, but that would still be significantly smaller than twinax. They would then be capable of 100m, would they not?
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The copper solution requires twinax, might as well run fiber as it's easier to deal with at length and can actually fit into the existing raceways (twinax is huge).
I think you're thinking of CX4 [wikipedia.org], which is indeed huge. 10Gb TwinAx [wikipedia.org] comes in SFP+ [wikipedia.org], which is the same port that you use for 10Gb fiber.
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One cable to rule them all (Score:5, Insightful)
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They actually tried this with FireWire (IEEE-1394) in the consumer electronics industry back in 2000-ish, but then the whole HDCP thing came up, and that was that.
The idea is that you'd have a home theater receiver that just had a crapload of firewire ports on the back, and all your stuff would plug in via that, including speakers. Never happened though.
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I dunno. HDMI 1.4 now sports ethernet and audio return channels. About the only thing absent is USB for low/high speed data (keyboards or mice / disk drives: 100 Mb/s ethernet is a little slow for disks).
So, I suppose it will factor out to three cable types: HDMI for "media" connections that are video-centric, ethernet for long distance data and networking connections, and USB for local data and peripherals. Maybe add 1394 (firewire) for video capture and control, though GbE and even 100 Mb/s ethernet coul
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OSI Network model. Separate the physical layer from the application layers and everything in between.
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They actually tried this with FireWire (IEEE-1394) in the consumer electronics industry back in 2000-ish, but then the whole HDCP thing came up, and that was that.
It probably would have worked if Apple had allowed it to succeed. They always fuck that kind of shit up.
Light Peak (Score:3, Insightful)
USB3, HDMI, DVI, Ethernet, DisplayPort, FireWire, eSATA, proprietary. There should be one kind cable that can be used for all of these purposes. We have the technology. Consumers will thank you.
Are you here from Intel marketing?
<wp:Light_Peak>
Oh, heck, that's still not working. fine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Peak [wikipedia.org]
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HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort are for raw video data. They have NOTHING in common with the USB mouse/keyboard on your desk. It makes no sense to combine them.
There's some good reasons for the differences. For instance, even if I could hook up my internet access to the same port as my hard drives, I never would... One needs low-overhead, realtime and no security, while th
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you really think you're gonna be sending 40Gb over copper?
Re:RIP OUT THE CAT5e CABLE BOYZ !! (Score:4, Informative)
The standard includes specifications for copper. 40GBASE-CR4 for 40GB which specifies 4 lanes of twinax cable, and 100GBASE-CR10 for 100GB which specifies 10 lanes of twinax.
Surprise, surprise. Serial too slow? Try parallel!
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Re:RIP OUT THE CAT5e CABLE BOYZ !! (Score:5, Insightful)
There isn't a whole lot of difference between the raw speed of the signal in a copper line and fiber line, the electrical signal already travels at effectively the speed of light (or close enough that it doesn't really matter). It's distance that's a problem for copper. An electrical signal through copper has significantly more attenuation than an optical signal through fiber, which means right from the very start the signal is cleaner and more usable. The cleaner the signal, the easier it is to pick up small variations in the signal accurately, and the more data you can pack into the signal. Copper is also vulnerable to noise, which further reduces the signal quality, which means a less complex signal is possible. This is why copper is useful for ultra-high speed IO inside a computer covering inches or less (the IO in a CPU travels only nanometers and is obscenely fast), but once you start stretching it a few feet its effectiveness drops off dramatically. Fiber is capable of handling much longer distances before the same attenuation loss occurs.
Other than that it's just the equipment on the back end that are different, and the concepts behind both fiber and copper are the same. Only the components are different.
In other words, it's trivial to make copper just as fast or faster than fiber. In fact, the fastest copper connections are already faster than the fastest fiber connections. What isn't trivial is making copper as fast as fiber over the same distances. Fiber wins hands down on a run of any distance. Therefor copper only wins on short runs, due to the huge price difference between the two.
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Well, if you plan ahead, you account for the attenuation in the cable. You can then counteract it, and get much greater distances. I know the strongest electromagnetic signal in my area is a country radio station, with a tower a few miles away. To counter that, I play hip hop, all day and all night, in my server room. Keeps my distribution switch from getting slowed down and depressed from the country music.
Re:IEEE 802.3ba code name (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately there is no corresponding 100000Base-MrT
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... and wants its A-Team back. Your meme is violating some copyright somewhere.
Was "I pity the fool" even in The A-Team? I watched like the first two or three seasons of the show and I don't recall Mr. T ever saying it. It was in Rocky III though... [youtube.com]
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No, Overrated wasn't what I had in mind, either....
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If I have a blade server, with 10 blades, each one running several virtual machines.. Do I want to deal with a each blade having at least two nics, and all that cabling, plus either FC cards, or additional 1GB iScsi cards?
Or do I want the back of the chasis for the blade server to just have two 40GB/s network connections?
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