2.5GbE only started gaining steam when cheap Realtek chips became available (especially since the Intel chips that were on the market earlier were buggy). Those

2.5GbE only started gaining steam when cheap Realtek chips became available (especially since the Intel chips that were on the market earlier were buggy). Those have been adopted by almost all desktop motherboards now on the market, and most laptops that still have Ethernet. Embedded systems are lagging because they're always behind technologically and because they have longer design cycles, but it's pretty clear that most devices designed in the last year or two are moving beyond 1GbE and 2.5GbE will be the new baseline going forward.