3 ms·

Why does any end user machine need more than a GB/sec?

haswell 3y ago
I’m curious to see what VR/AR applications this might have. Imagine peripheral devices capable of much more than they are today merely because of more bandwidth. Imagine how useful it would be to have a wireless NAS capable of acting as an iSCSI target without having to worry about running cables. And as “spatial” computing use cases increase along with extremely high res formats like ProRes, we’ll quickly find ways to use the extra bandwidth.
crote 3y ago
The same reason end users want more than 640k of memory.
dspillett 3y ago
It probably doesn't, except for a few cases like a video editing station not working with entirely local resources. But when you have a lot of devices in the same collision domain (like WiFi, and hubbed rather than switched networks of old) this is a shared network leg: get a 50+ devices in the same room pushing data back & forth at various rates and I doubt you'd see anything like the theoretical total bandwidth of 224Gbit/sec for that network leg (and latency will shoot up). Maybe you'll still reliably get 1Gbit/device which you wouldn't with other tech, but you won't see anything like 224/50+Gbit per device. Try doing anything much on shared WiFi at a large conference, or on your phone's non-wifi data capabilities in a large public venue with hundreds of other phones even just idly interacting with the network, and you'll see what I mean. The speed figure is just a headline figure, and attention grabber, not actually misleading but not at all as meaningful as the headline writers might think. The more important details are how well the tech works when congested, how much how many devices can do before the effective available bandwidth falls through the floor and/or latency figures reach for the moon. That 224Git figure is the upper limit for the whole collision domain (the room, as this is an LoS constrained technology), much like 56Mbit was the upper limit on 802.11g and 11Mbit was the upper limit on 802.11b (how often did you see those rates even on aggregate with more than a couple of devices active at a time?).

I’m curious to see what VR/AR applications this might have. Imagine peripheral devices capable of much more than they are today merely because of more bandwidth. Imagine how useful it would be to have a wireless NAS capable of acting as an iSCSI target without having to worry about running cables. And as “spatial” computing use cases increase along with extremely high res formats like ProRes, we’ll quickly find ways to use the extra bandwidth.

crote 3y ago

The same reason end users want more than 640k of memory.

dspillett 3y ago

It probably doesn't, except for a few cases like a video editing station not working with entirely local resources. But when you have a lot of devices in the same collision domain (like WiFi, and hubbed rather than switched networks of old) this is a shared network leg: get a 50+ devices in the same room pushing data back & forth at various rates and I doubt you'd see anything like the theoretical total bandwidth of 224Gbit/sec for that network leg (and latency will shoot up). Maybe you'll still reliably get 1Gbit/device which you wouldn't with other tech, but you won't see anything like 224/50+Gbit per device. Try doing anything much on shared WiFi at a large conference, or on your phone's non-wifi data capabilities in a large public venue with hundreds of other phones even just idly interacting with the network, and you'll see what I mean. The speed figure is just a headline figure, and attention grabber, not actually misleading but not at all as meaningful as the headline writers might think. The more important details are how well the tech works when congested, how much how many devices can do before the effective available bandwidth falls through the floor and/or latency figures reach for the moon. That 224Git figure is the upper limit for the whole collision domain (the room, as this is an LoS constrained technology), much like 56Mbit was the upper limit on 802.11g and 11Mbit was the upper limit on 802.11b (how often did you see those rates even on aggregate with more than a couple of devices active at a time?).