On 8/23/10 2:59 AM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Sun, 22 Aug 2010 22:23:19 -1000, Michael Painter said:
Researchers in South Korea have built a networking router that transmits data at record speeds from components found in most high-end desktop computers http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/26096/?nlid=3423
Two great quotes from the article:
"That isn't fast enough to take advantage of the full speed of a typical network card, which operates at 10 gigabytes per second."
Anybody got a network of PCs that have cards that run at 10GBytes/sec? ;)
I have a journalist who can keep track of signficant digits...
For that matter, have enough 10Gbit network cards shipped that they are now considered "typical" (as in "more than 5%")? A Lamborghini costs about 10 times as much as a nice Camry. 10Gig cards are closer to 30-50 times as much as 1gig cards. Now, if Lambos aren't typical cars, are 10Gig cards typical? Just sayin'....
10gig nics are becoming ubiquitous in datacenters. 10Gigabit on mainboard is pretty ubiquitous in in bladeservers and adds about $150 to the BOM of a 1u pizza box in volume (for copper).
"Lash enough software routers together that run at 40 gigabytes per second, and you get what is essentially a single-terabit router. Using such a system, routers might some day run completely in software."
Ahh.. but the lashing is the tricky part that costs the big bucks, as these guys will undoubtedly discover - life will get a lot more complicated once they saturate the first PCI backplane and need a second. Who wants to bet they'll end up re-inventing SGI's NUMAlink or similar interconnect? ;)
pci isn't a shared bus anymore it's a series of tubes... In any event, they don't have to, we have quick-path which 100Gb/s per-direction per path at 3.2ghz or pci-e 3.0 which is 8Gb/s per lane and comes with all the lovely logic you expect from a (non-ethernet) switch fabric. What it really comes down to is packets per watt or packets per dollar, if it's cheaper to do it this way then people will, if not BFD.