4 ms·
Do the hw offload in the GPUs :).
by acd 7y ago
Do the hw offload in the GPUs :).
- drewg123 7y agoThat makes no sense. The main advantage of offloading filtering and steering is that the packets can be dropped in the NIC, without being sent to the host. This avoids wasting PCIe and memory bandwidth along with CPU cycles. Doing the hw offload in a GPU, while more generic and programmable, would involve peer-to-peer DMA of the traffic to a GPU, which will waste PCIe bandwidth. It sounds like what you want is a programmable smart NIC
- 0xEFF 7y agoEthernet over HDMI is interesting.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoNo, it’s a complete no-go. HDMI 1.4 is 10GT/s but only in one direction (your PC streams content to the display, there is no need for the other way around). Newer versions have limited bandwidth in the reverse direction to support things like CEC and ARC, but nothing substantial.
- Eikon 7y agoWouldn’t that work using cards having both hdmi in and hdmi out, using two hdmi cables for duplex?
- ComputerGuru 7y agoWhat would the benefit be? Cat5E can carry 10g, is cheaper, and you only need one cable. You have twice as many connections, twice as many PHY components, twice as many points of failure, etc etc if you go with two HDMI cables instead.
- 0xEFF 7y agoThe benefit would be the GPU manipulating and filtering packets without the data hitting the PCI bus or the CPU. Imagine a firewall operating at 80 Gbit/sec with no CPU utilization.
- w7 7y agoSome Dell enterprise switches actually used HDMI for stacking[0]. Image: https://kbimg.dell.com/library/KB/DELL_ORGANIZATIONAL_GROUPS/DELL_GLOBAL/Dell_Networking/5500%20Stack.png https://kbimg.dell.com/library/KB/DELL_ORGANIZATIONAL_GROUPS... But it's not a common thing and I believe is outmoded. [0] https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/how10728/how-to-stack-dell-networking-powerconnect-5500-model-switches?lang=en https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/how10728/how-t...
- pbalau 7y agoIs that HDMI protocol or HDMI cables? There are a bunch of sensors that use ethernet connectors, but have nothing to do with networks
- w7 7y agoJust cables.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoClever. Stacking necessarily requires a loop, so you can just use unidirectional data flow and you don’t need 2x cables. Or perhaps they use a proprietary half-duplex implementation over the single channel, which would allow for it to continue working with a device out. I can’t see why, though. It can’t be cheaper (and they have to license the HDMI spec).
- 0xEFF 7y agoNot quite sure why my comment got downvoted so heavily. My point is a commodity GPU is attached to 4 physical ports, each capable of 80 Gbit/sec for a total bandwidth of 320 Gbit/sec with DP 2.0. The GP's comment on using the GPU for offloading is interesting. There's a physical link connected directly to the GPU without having to go over the PCI bus or through the CPU. Bi-directional also doesn't matter. Many applications are uni-directional or async. I could easily see a situation where one DP link is used for upstream and 3 DP links are used for downstream, or even all DP links for one direction and a traditional interface used for upstream.
- acd 7y agoBut the raw computing power of a GPU would be suitable for packet processing. I do not think you would run into any 100-1000 rule limit then. But yes agree it would use a lot of PCI express bandwidth to DMA the packets back and forth to the GPU.
- pbalau 7y agoNo, packet processing needs way more bandwidth than raw processing power.