Relentless Competition Drives Down Ethernet Switch Costs | Hacker News Reader

Relentless Competition Drives Down Ethernet Switch Costs

nextplatform.com

18 pointsrbanffy8 comments

Weird headline. Could have just called it public funded technology improvement help reduce costs of switches...

The article doesn't make that claim. Is that really the case?

I am looking for some cheap 16/24 port 10Gbit RJ-45 switch for my house. Any recommendations?

Cheap compared to what? I've been looking at a 4-port SFP+ switch from Mikrotik but they have a 16 SFP+ port switch for $399. Their SFP+ RJ-45 module is $65 If you fill all the ports, that's $1,439 total but my understanding is these modules are relatively hot, you may want to enhance the cooling.

CRS317-1G-16S+RM https://mikrotik.com/product/crs317_1g_16s_rm

S+RJ10 https://mikrotik.com/product/s_rj10

Edit: Googling "10Gbit RJ-45 switch" turns up a blog article from last year with another option if you really only want RJ45, Netgear ProSAFE 16-port 10-Gigabit Smart Managed Switch (XS716T) ~$1,300. There's also a 28-port model for a little over $2,000.

https://nascompares.com/2018/01/19/cheapest-10gbe-switches/

Cheap compared to nothing, I just meant that I don't need those switches to be enterprise grade (in terms of throughput), just home enthusiast grade :)

I saw a YouTube review of one of the smaller Mikrotik switches and they found if you used the router features the throughput dropped significantly (like over 8Gbps as a "dumb" switch down to 3Gbps with some routing enabled), the same could be true for the larger ones.

The Netgear's spec PDF includes some more detail about the hardware, the XS716T has 600 MHz Cortex-A9 Single Core, 512MB RAM 8MB SPI + 256MB NAND FLASH, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to make a comparison or have a sense of whether that's enough. I can see that the MikroTik has a 800MHz dual core Marvell Prestera 98DX8216 (a 32-bit ARMv7 processor) with 1GB RAM and 16GB flash storage. Of course, the software running on that hardware is also crucial; many Android phones have better hardware specs than iPhones yet the iPhones soundly out-perform them at many tasks.

https://www.netgear.com/images/datasheet/switches/SmartSwitc...

At that kind of task, the "main" CPU isn't that relevant: It's hopelessly underpowered to actually handle the traffic anyways, so the more important question for performance is what the data plane hardware can do without getting help from the CPU.

I am assuming singlecore is always worse than dual core, however I do know that mikrotik can have performance issues so I guess only comparison benchmarks would tell.

Btw Android phones are slow because of Java, but iphones also have better CPUs than Androids nowadays

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