3 ms·
Agreed. Change is coming! I feel like 5Gbit is mostly useful for switches, that a lot of other products are gonna jump direct to 10GBase-T. 25GBase-T or 40GBa
by jauntywundrkind 1y ago
Agreed.
Change is coming! I feel like 5Gbit is mostly useful for switches, that a lot of other products are gonna jump direct to 10GBase-T.
25GBase-T or 40GBase-T is probably going to be a bit more energy intensive for a while, and 30m is ok but not great range if you're trying to span an office.
Ideally I'd really like to see optics costs fall, for consumers to start picking it up. Maybe the future is SFP everywhere and perhaps that makes sense (swap out transciever if one fails! Direct Attach Copper maybe or Base-T for convenience). But I really hope we see some real inroads, some of this separation between consumer & commercial go away.
I got a 150' 40Gbps fiber optic display port cable for ~$50, over half a decade ago. Unidirectional (I believe) but still just totally reset my expectations of what stuff really has to cost! Seemed too good to be true but still using it! We're spending more and more energy and effort trying to squeeze bits down a difficult copper channel, but optics right there, getting easier and easier.
I wish Intel hadn't given up on on-package interconnects (available on package on Xeon & Phi, 2016-2019). High end at the time. But now PCIe, USB, and DisplayPort all have optical capable specs, and the energy cost and distance of copper keeps making less and less sense. We gotta go forward, and the break from scant tiny consumer bandwidth to something much different feels like a potential dam burst.
I hope Intel's still doing some optical stuff with the recent shake ups. Loved their embarrassingly parallel RISC-V beast with 16 optical links. And it was a year ago they demoed a new all optical switch (rip Intel/Barefoot Tofino, you wonderful p4 programmable beast) with copious 4Tb/s PCIe switching. https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/01/intel_graph_analytics_chip/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/01/intel_graph_analytics... https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/intel-unveils-first-integrated-optical-io-chiplet https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/intel-unv...