To me this is kind of strange, I thought Intel had a good reputation as far as Ethernet and Wireless drivers were concerned. Certainly much better than (old) Broadcom, Realtek, Ralink, ST and the like.
Come to think of it, the last decade has been really bad for Intel. They no longer have a node advantage. They no longer have a performance advantage in any market space that I can think of outside of frequency hungry low-thread applications (games).
Their WiFi chips are good, but second tier. Their Modem chips are third tier. Their node is mostly on par with the competition, for now. Their CPUs are trading blows with AMD. Their ethernet chips are a generation behind. Optane is is a bright spot, but we'll see how they squander that.
The next big diversification play by Intel is GPUs, I have no idea how that will pan out.
Optane is a neat idea, but the severe change in software architecture combined with only select CPUs even supporting it will limit uptake outside FAANGs or organizations with really specialized needs.
I'm not sure it's really a niche.
They were also scrambling to move all their services away from use of that database in favour of a horizontally scaled system that could grow further.
The query rate that can be handled by a single conventional server are pretty monstrous these days. You'd have to be simultaneously a) maybe top-50 website level load (I'm well aware that there's a lot more than websites out there, but at the same time there really aren't that many organizations working at that scale, much as there are many that think they are) and b) confident that you weren't going to grow much.
Financial systems especially trading platforms need to ensure market fairness they also need to have at the end a single database as you can’t have any conflicts in your orders and the orders need to be executed in the order they came in across the entire system not just a single instance.
This means that even when they do end up with some micro-service-esque architecture for the front end it still talks to a single monolithic database cluster in the end which is used to record and orchestrate everything.
Take a look at how cagey Intel is acting about Optane: https://www.semiaccurate.com/2018/05/31/intel-dodges-every-q...
This is the same behaviour as with Intel's LTE chips, where promised features keep slipping (much to Apple's dismay).
https://www.storagereview.com/intel_optane_dc_persistent_mem...
All of which looks to solve the wear problem even if it means higher price and latency.
However my sidelines impression was intel got sidetracked with 40g while everyone else, especially dc network fabric land, went towards 25/100.
Also IIRC for low end devices and battery life, Intel GPUs are play the nicest
Ethernet NIC/CNA rankings(IMHO):
1. Mellanox is the pack leader right now.
2. Chelsio is right up there with them, but not leading.
3. SolarFlare and Intel bring up the middle ground.
4. Everyone else (QLogic, Broadcom, etc)
Aquantia is an unknown for me. As long as they dont suck, they'll probably go in tier 3.
I am speaking off the cuff as someone heavily involved and interested in RF in general and WiFi/LTE in particular.
From my anecdota(shame this isnt a word), Atheros chips have better SNR and higher symbol discrimination thanks to cleaner amps, better signal discrimination logic, and tend to be on the forefront of newer RF techniques in the WiFi space. All this culminates in better throughput, latency, and spectrum utilization than anyone else.
It also helps that their support under Linux is far superior to most everything else, which helps in Router/AP/Client integration and testing.
I don't even like Qualcomm, but from my experience, you will almost always regret choosing someone else for anything but the most basic requirements.
A big frustration with Qualcomm wifi on Windows has been that they do not provide driver downloads to end users. If you are using a laptop that has been abandoned by the OEM and you have a wifi driver problem you have to hunt for the driver on sketchy 3rd party sites or just live with it. I have personally had to help several people find drivers because ancient Qualcomm drivers were causing bug checks on power state transitions.
What real-world experiences have you had with Intel wifi on Linux and Windows that make you believe it is second rate?
Mellanox has 40GbE (and above) adapters with good reputation.
Mellanox also have 10GbE stuff, but that's mostly older generation / legacy (low end). Not sure how the 10GbE ones are regarded.
Available https://sybatech.en.alibaba.com/product/60793590161-80442320...
I talked to Syba USA two months ago and they said end of Q1 so I didn't pursue the idea of bringing 500 into the US and sell them. I still might. Do you know any good platforms for this sort of thing?
The other reason I didn't pursue this because the Realtek based 2.5gbps adapters are out https://www.centralpoint.nl/kabeladapters-verloopstukjes/clu... (USB A version: https://www.centralpoint.nl/kabeladapters-verloopstukjes/clu...) and I wasn't sure whether people would care enough to jump to 5gbps.
Unfortunately, I don't know 500 people who'd want one and I think shipping from the US to anywhere not-US (say, Australia) would be prohibitively expensive.
I wouldn't call them solid - at least the X710. The net is full of bad experiences regarding them. They're VMware certified but are apparently really unstable on VMware; I have no personal experience with that platform. On Windows Hyper-V hosts I had the NICs repeatedly go into "disconnected" status and individual ports would straight up suddenly stop working. On Linux KVM hosts that didn't occur, at least for me.
Supposedly upgrading the firmware to a recent-ish release fixes it - I haven't had it occur after. That's understandable. What's not understandable is that the NIC was released in 2014 and the issue was resolved only in like 2018 according to the net.
Broadcom comparatively has crap drivers and decent silicon, meaning your cable modem works fine (with no bufferbloat or jitter issues), but good luck with that random WiFi chipset on Linux :P
For instance my biz dev guy thought that Intel's graph processing toolkit based on Hadoop would be the bee's knees and I didn't have to look at it to know that it was going to be something a junior dev knocked out in two weeks that moves about 20x more data to get the same result as what I knocked out in two days.
NVIDIA, on the other hand, impresses me with drivers and release engineering. Once I learned how to bypass their GUI installer I came to appreciate what a good job they do.
(They gotta have that GUI installer otherwise some dummy with a Radeon card or Intel Integrated 'Graphics' will post on their forum about how the drivers don't work.)
Maybe they need a GUI, but it doesn’t need to be such a bloated monstrosity.