Comments Locked

75 Comments

Back to Article

  • imaheadcase - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    "Though datacenter operators will probably have to pay for the luxury; with even a Cisco Nexus 400 GbE 16-port switch costing upwards of $11,000, we don't expect 800GbE to come cheap."

    Good thing you posted the press release here then..
  • p1esk - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    $11k for 16 port 400GbE switch actually sounds pretty cheap. Imagine it connects a 16 server rack, where each server has 8 V100 cards. That's about $100k per server.
  • Samus - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    I was thinking the same thing. Structurally this is probably the same investment cost as current 400Gbps deployment. The only difference is component costs.
  • mrvco - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    At $11k the cost per port may appear expensive initially, but considering the capacity it sounds surprisingly reasonable. Of course I expect that the real cost will be in the 16x upstream and downstream devices (and/or 400G transceivers) that can support and fully utilize such a switch.
  • close - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    Oh don't worry, plenty of people on AT are itching to tell everyone how much they "need" 1TbE and how the market already begs for it because the current speeds are just not enough for whatever invented case they think everyone needs.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    If everyone thought the way you do we would still be on fast ethernet and 16 bit ISA slots.
  • close - Saturday, April 11, 2020 - link

    Wanting more is one thing. Pretending that everyone "needs" some technology that brings 0 benefit to 99.9% of consumer out there is quite another. I may want a 128K 16000Hz monitor and we may very well have them some day. But expecting we should have them today "in the name of evolution" is about as stupid as your comment.

    The evolution from 16bit ISA slots brought tangible benefits for end users, solved actual problems. Don't let that throw a spanner in your reasoning, run to Wikipedia and search for some more stuff that existed before you parents knew their names and you may just find one to make your point... eventually.

    Having an SSD 10 times faster than old HDDs makes a difference. Your games, apps, OS load instantly, you can to more stuff at the same time, etc. Faster internet? Hell yeah. Faster home LAN? In a regular home most connections these days are WiFi (phones, tablets, laptops), not even close to Gigabit (real life). Very few people have more than 4 wired connections in the house, those coming from the router (and even those may be something like a Hue bridge). But there's always going to be someone to whine around here (or anywhere) about how 10G should be everywhere because reasons. Completely ignoring that most people do not want wires and none of the things they do daily (and I mean NONE) benefit from that speed. Facebook? Twitter? Youtube? Netflix? Yeah, I'm sure everyone has a home lab with 1000 VMs that somehow have to be migrated every 4s, they transfer PB of data every day and 10G makes a difference, etc.

    I on the other hand could actually use this 100TBps

    So go peddle your platitudes in reply to someone else's comment, maybe put one more LED on your PC so it runs faster. Maybe you need at least 10000 cores in your PC because you don't want to sound backward or against progress and have to stand behind that comment.
  • sa666666 - Sunday, April 12, 2020 - link

    Wow, triggered much?
  • mode_13h - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link

    Either that or @close is seriously confused.
  • wolfesteinabhi - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link

    these switches/network speeds are primarily targeted towards datacenter and HPC crowd ...and yes a lot of them do crave for higher and higher bandwidth ...because the multimedia and other such data needs are growing quite exponentially .... and its hard to server those to millions of people (or other devices) simultaneously.
  • JKflipflop98 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link

    Kids must have forgot to give close his Alzheimer's medicine today. Today's forecast is anger with a good chance of extreme confusion.
  • Deicidium369 - Wednesday, April 15, 2020 - link

    If someone could just get those damned kids off his lawn it would all be OK
  • NikosD - Thursday, April 16, 2020 - link

    @close has always the best comments in AnandTech's section and you should be careful reading them with proper respect and care.
    Of course in quarantine times due to COVID-19 and government policies around it, anyone could exaggerate a little more than usual especially after a provocative comment.
  • WaltC - Friday, April 17, 2020 - link

    Just be delighted that you don't have some moron government agency telling you what you *don't* need and making sure you can't get it even if you don't agree...;)
  • mode_13h - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link

    > Good thing you posted the press release here then..

    It's not the press release. I'm sure you didn't even bother to check.

    More to the point, if the content is not relevant or interesting for you, why did you even click it? Instead of attacking the site for publishing content not suited to your interests, why not just go somewhere else?
  • Deicidium369 - Wednesday, April 15, 2020 - link

    that retailer router-switch.com is a joke - good luck ever getting anything from them - CDW is more realistic - not that you are actually in the market for one - I know this is all speculative.
  • nismotigerwvu - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    That's some mind-bending bandwidth! Sure there will be overhead, but we're still talking about a link approaching 100 gigabytes per second (BYTES!).
  • MenhirMike - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    It's crazy to think how to feed that pipe. I mean, I guess this isn't really meant as an Ethernet Card for a single server but for aggregation of many servers, but still, feeding 100 GB/s into that pipe is mindboggling. That's 3-4 BluRay disks (or one modern AAA game) every second.
  • firewrath9 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    These will probably be used as interconnects between servers. You could have a 42U server cabinet with say 40 1U compute servers, then have a networking switch handling cross server (idk maybe 40Gbe to each of the 1U servers, then a 800Gbe link to a central switch, handling many server cabinets
  • Cokie - Saturday, April 11, 2020 - link

    Even though my server workloads really don't usually go past 1 or 10 Gbit/s, it's not unusual for my to have 1-4 x 10Gbit/s just to the SAN. Not using 400 Gbit/s, but definitely would be nice for SAN links that I already saturate. Cool to see the expensive tech, even if I can't afford it, and hope it drives down the prices to make it more accessible.
  • shabby - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    When is this coming to my dlink router?
  • samlebon2306 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Why? Are you planning to watch 16K porn at 500fps?
  • shabby - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Don't tell me what I can or cannot do!
  • Dragonstongue - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    ROFL
  • phaedrae - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    If you build it, they will cum.
  • samlebon2306 - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    When they cum, they make a big mess. They better make them optical, so we could see them in action.
  • ButtHoleDiver - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    You read my mind.
  • AshlayW - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    User name checks out
  • JTWrenn - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    Well I wasn't until I read your post...but now I am doing research.
  • bcronce - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    100Gb-PON is not scheduled for several more years and 10Gb-pon is just around the corner. Just focus on 25Gb for now.
  • ryrynz - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    Not in your lifetime.
  • Guspaz - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Meanwhile, consumers still struggle to get faster than support for gigabit Ethernet. Despite multi-gigabit controllers now being available for less than a dollar, it's still exceptionally rare to see even 2.5G, let alone 10G. If you look at every single AM4 motherboard that Asus makes, of the 37, only 7 of them support 2.5G or faster, only 3 support 5G or faster, and only 2 support 10G and faster.

    All seven of these boards are also in their most expensive "ROG" lineup. It's not like the cheaper boards are relying on some integrated ethernet controller either, many of them have an Intel ethernet controller on an AMD board, so the cost difference to the BOM for a 2.5G chip should be relatively minimal.
  • 06GTOSC - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Because you're dividing up that bandwidth between thousands, even tens of thousands, of people.
  • Guspaz - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    I do not have thousands of people living in my home. I'm talking about home networking, not Internet access. 2.5G controllers can be had for pennies in bulk, which also means that there's no reason a cheap 2.5G switch can't be developed. Just because consumers often don't have Internet faster than a gigabit doesn't mean they don't always (Bell Canada's fastest tier is 1.5 gigabit), but more importantly, pretty much all home computers now use SSDs, which can easily saturate a 1 gigabit connection between machines.
  • saratoga4 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    2.5G is still being rolled out, lots announced, but not much shipping. Hence, prices are higher and options are limited. Probably be another year or two before prices settle down. Until then, no point in using 2.5G, you can get a faster 10g SFP+ switch for less than it'd cost you to do 2.5G.
  • voicequal - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    2.5G is useful if you have Cat5e cable installed.
  • PaulHoule - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    I bought a half kilometer of solid core Cat6 cable (for PoE), it's a little more annoying to put ends on, but costs hardly more than Cat5e if you consider your labor.
  • mode_13h - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link

    0.5 km for what? Are you wiring up a small office?

    I just bought some pre-fab Cat 6A, which is the next step up from Cat 6. Cat 6E is just a marketing ploy - not a real standard.
  • Deicidium369 - Wednesday, April 15, 2020 - link

    Depends - often required Cat6 - depends on the Cat5 used.
  • close - Sunday, April 12, 2020 - link

    You don't have 10G, 5G, or even 2.5G because only a handful of people benefit from them, another bunch just want it to geek around with it, and the rest (vast majority) have exactly 0 need for it. People don't even want wires, they have phones, tablets, laptops on WiFi. If you can't make WiFi faster they don't care. There simply aren't enough people who constantly transfer that much data in their home network to feel the difference and want to pay for it.

    It's the reason why homes don't come standard with electrical wiring capable of handling 1000+A. For every person that needs it there are 10 million others that don't.

    Selling someone a 10G laptop only to let them find out at home that they need expensive switches or better cabling just guarantees disappointment. So manufacturers don't bother raising the BOM. Unlike a faster CPU or SSD, seeing the improvement in your network is a lot harder when your games, Netflix, and YouTube run just the same and 90% of the devices in your house can't even be connected to it.

    In the meantime don't expect everyone else to subsidize your purchase by buying something they don't need and can't use just to drag the prices down. If $2-300 (partially second hand prices) is too much for you to roll out 10G in your own home then you probably don't need it.
  • mode_13h - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link

    Why are you even talking about that, here? This article has nothing to do with consumer or SOHO networking.

    You've clearly got some issues...
  • Deicidium369 - Wednesday, April 15, 2020 - link

    I have 10Gb/s internet access - direct peer on a fiber provider's access point on my property. Instead of taking the $ for long term lease of a 25'x25' portion of my property (I am sitting on 3000acres), I worked out a deal for bandwidth (had no option other than paying the local cable co over $100K to extend their network to my property edge, and then the privilege of paying them $100/mo for 30Mb/s dn and 5 up) Started out as 1Gb/s about 4 years ago, then moved to a 10Gb/s circuit with 2Gb/s and then later 2.5Gb/s - was at 2.5 for almost 2 years - and 4 or 5 weeks ago they sent a message that the 10Gb/s was fully turned up - honestly even at 2Gb/s it was next to impossible to saturate that link - only large downloads from Microsoft or someone's Google Drive could come close - and 10Gb/s is just a number - even the business can't come close to burning that.
  • Dug - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    I agree with 2.5G for home machines and wish it was widely adopted.
    5G and 10G ethernet is a hit or miss with many different controllers, switches, drivers, power and heat, but especially cables.
    Most homes will have cat5e which works with 2.5G just fine and doesn't require any special equipment or power requirements.
  • Deicidium369 - Wednesday, April 15, 2020 - link

    Problem with the 2.5Gb/s and 5Gb/s - has slowed the adoption of 10Gb/s -

    And no, MOST CAT5e CANNOT support 2.5Gb/s over anything other than a couple meters.
  • Unashamed_unoriginal_username_x86 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    I agree it's stupid the prices stay up and OEMs act like it's a premium technology, but 99% of consumers just hook it up to internet, and 99% of them don't get above 500Mbps. In Australia, 100Mbps is a premium plan; on fibre!
  • MenhirMike - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    I've just recently done some diving into 2.5 GBit/s, and right now it's just not worth it because of the lack of Switches that support it and the extra cost of transceivers in case of SFP+ switches.

    Plus, 10G cards are relatively cheap now (Less than $100) - still more expensive than 2.5 GBit NICs, but with a e.g., MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN Switch, some Intel X520 NICs, and DAC Cables (If 7m length is enough, otherwise transceivers) you get 10G for a price that isn't completely crazy.

    Also, it's possible to use 10G for a server/nas and support multiple Gigabit clients.
  • Brane2 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    What's the point?
    used ConnectX2 can get you easily to 40G if you are willing to use SFP DAC cables instead of modules.
    Which also come cheap.
    Only snag is that they can reach only up to 15m. For more than that you need either active cables, which can be more expensive, or a pair of SFP+ modules and a fiber.

    Why f**k around with this slow, overpriced cr*p ?
  • drexnx - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    don't blame the motherboard manufactures, there's no home switch/router infrastructure out there, at all.

    go ahead and price out a standard home router for 4+1 ports on RJ45 >1GbE. Doesn't exist.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    There's no home router support because nothing you buy comes with it. Chicken and egg problem. Given the cost of 2.5GBe hardware is barely higher then 1GBe and uses the same cables theres really no reason most motherboards dont have it built in already. It cant be a hatred of Realtek given how many use Realtek hardware.
  • brucethemoose - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    On top of other comments, ethernet is basically enthusiast only tech now. 99% of consumers are working on wifi... heck, most laptops dont even have an RJ45 port anymore. That 1G connection to the modem won't be a bottleneck for years, and they arent really doing stuff over LAN either.

    There are use cases for businesses, but they mind as well jump to something better than 2.5G at that point.
  • CaedenV - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Big problem now is that most high end wifi can easily go over 1Gbps, while the port that ties them to the wire is only at 1Gbps... It is time for even basic wired equipment to do 2Gbps at least, if not making the full jump to 10
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    And the internet they are connected to can barely saturate fast ethernet. The 1GBe ethernet is not the bottleneck there, not yet anyway.
  • Guspaz - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    Millions of Canadians served by Bell Canada's FTTH network have access to service that tops out at 1.5 gigabits per second. The cost is CDN$95 per month, or roughly US$68 per month. Right now, they market it for maintaining high speeds when you have lots of wired and wireless devices in your home, but wouldn't it be nice if the ethernet side of that was faster than one gigabit?
  • Brane2 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    That's basically nothing. All they did is used 2x bigger connectors and packed those lanes in.
    Not that much better than existing 400G solution.

    I can understand that someone might want it, but it's not newsworthy step ahead...
  • bcronce - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    All they did was pack a bunch of explosives and aimed towards the moon. Most breakthroughs don't result in sudden commercially viable 10x increases. 800Gb isn't that amazing anyway. We have 40Tb/s fiber. But it is a big step to make it an industry standard.
  • Brane2 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    This will never be an industry standard.

    WRT to Saturn V, yes, they employed Nazis and their tech as a foundation ( Von Braun etc) and indebted taxpayers to their eyeballs to achieve - what ?

    Staurn V certainly didn't end as "industry standard"...
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    Aside from your bone to pick with Nazis, which, who cares? Those Nazis put us on the moon, something no other country has achieved.

    Why does it matter? well, the information we gathered from the apollo missions was later used for advancements in control systems, modern rocketry used to launch the satellites that allow for instantaneous communication around the globe, unlocking the secrets of the universe, and of course that information led to the creation of semi-permanent space stations.

    But I guess you're right, why should we ever try to do something unless it is blatantly obvious we will all benefit? That behavior works so well for the developing world, doesnt it?
  • Lord of the Bored - Saturday, April 11, 2020 - link

    Apollo did not "indebt taxpayers to their eyeballs". At their peak, they took five percent of the national budget. Which is big enough to not just be filed under "other expenses", but not breaking the bank by any means.

    NASA has a proud tradition of doing amazing things on a shoestring budget, then getting raked over the coals for how ridiculously expensive they are because people simply ASSUME they have to be taking a huge swath of the federal budget without looking. Apollo was no exception.

    Also, the list of technologies created for Apollo that found widespread usage is massive and includes cordless power tools(because they needed cordless power tools), the modern tennis shoe(based on techniques invented to manufacture moonwalk boots), and kidney dialysis machines(based on the spacecrafts' water-recycling systems).

    More topical to the present audience: While not an invention of NASA, their unusually heavy reliance on integrated circuits(they were buying half of all ICs sold at the time) IS credited with advancing the state of the art by about twenty years. They were buying these parts because their market was one of the few where a computer was needed, but size and weight were important considerations.
    What did your computer and cellular phone look like back in Y2K?
  • Deicidium369 - Wednesday, April 15, 2020 - link

    And von braun used the wok of Goddard, an american.
  • jfmonty2 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    You can squeeze 40Tb/s over a single fiber, yes, but you don't exactly have a 40Tb/s link between two devices. As far as I'm aware, that kind of bandwidth is only achievable using extremely dense wavelength multiplexing to combine a whole bunch of links. So you can have maybe 128 machines on one end talking to 128 on the other end at a few hundred Gb/s each.
  • willis936 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Pro-tip: all optical signals start and end as electrical signals. You still need to make a 8x100G link if you want to modulate 8 channels on a single piece of fiber. What's really astonishing here is the 100G link. If this doesn't impress you, then you simply have no clue. When I stepped out of the industry about a year ago, 50GBaud PAM-4 plugfests were still relatively new things. I would hear higher ups in big companies poo-poo the idea of making links that fast because demand was not high enough to warrant it. Still, it is where all of the R&D money is spent because lower speeds are already done. It's difficult to overstate just how much effort went into making something like an 8-lane 800G link possible. Just go to the meetings.
  • Brane2 - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    it's not about impressing me. It's about making real advance.
    And those advances are about as real as WI-Fi speed advances, where marketing bulls**t paints parallel universe.

    THis thing is pushing copper past practical limits. Basically they are playing with overclocking the copper SERDES. OK, so what ?
    You get higher speeds, but at what costs ?
  • voicequal - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Datacenter is mostly about $/bps. If this 2x bps at 1.5x $$, then it delivered value and will be adopted.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    And here I am with a ISP-issued DSL router that is lavishly equipped with 4 100mbit ethernet ports and yes, I got it about 11 months ago when my last one died.
  • Adonisds - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Does it use fiber optics and a different connector than the one in the picture?
  • Railgun - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Runs fine on Cat3
  • willis936 - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    The PMD isn’t mentioned in this article or the press release (afaict). You need to be a member (anyone got 5 grand?) to see the spec. This is one reason why IEEE specs are better: at least third parties can easily evaluate them.
  • A5 - Friday, April 10, 2020 - link

    Technically, Ethernet spec isn’t tied to any physical media.

    Practically, anything past 10GbE is on fiber. Cat 8 can take 40G about 25m.
  • willis936 - Saturday, April 11, 2020 - link

    It does depend on the specific clause. Clause 92 and 93 are 100GBASE over 4 lanes of cable and backplane, respectively. Clause 83D (CAUI-4) is 100GBASE over 4 lanes of unspecified PMD.
  • Deicidium369 - Wednesday, April 15, 2020 - link

    Purely optical - even the 10Gb/s SFP+ over copper was pushing it.
  • CaedenV - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    All I want are standard $150 motherboards with 10 gig Ethernet on board, and an 8 port switch with at least 2 10 gig ports under $100. Is that too much to ask for?
  • RealBeast - Thursday, April 9, 2020 - link

    Apparently so, I recently picked up a QNAP 308S only to find out that it doesn't work with Intel X520DA2 cards so I'm stuck with a daisy chain in the office.
  • A5 - Saturday, April 11, 2020 - link

    At this point I'd settle for all motherboards having 2.5/5G support and some cheap switches to support it. I don't need 10G yet, but more than 1G would be nice for internal stuff.
  • mode_13h - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link

    This.
  • Tomatotech - Saturday, April 11, 2020 - link

    I have no idea how well it works in practice, but gigabit cards (or USB-gigabit Ethernet converters for laptops) are cheap as chips, and cheap 8-port managed gigabit switches do link aggregation, so you could run 2 or 3 cables from your PC to your switch, and the same again to your server. That would get you something resembling 3gb speeds, more likely 2 to 2.5gb but it’s something.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now