Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

I read about this the other day and still somewhat supprised it has two 10 GbE ports. I say supprised, and wonder if it has the horsepower to drive them at that speed. Thinking along the lines of a firewall type application.

Be very interesting in tests when they come out and what kinda thruput you can sustain.

[EDIT ADD] My surprise/excitement stems from the aspect that to get that kinda feature on mainstream motherboard, you're always looking at the higher end of the offerings.

View on HN

We use the Marvell Armada 8k SOC (quad core ARMv8, clocked at 1.6GHz) in an embedded board. We can sustain 10Gbps TCP throughout to the CPU on that with around 60% CPU usage on a single core. Bear in mind that these are all large packets (1500 bytes), and it's much harder to achieve this will small packets.

I'd be pretty surprised if at the 1.5GHz part couldn't handle the same.

Out of interest, can I ask what you're using that kind of throughput for with a SOC?

Our company provides network measurement devices and services (typically used on the internet). We benchmark internet connections, effectively. With some internet connections exceeding 1Gbps these days, we need hardware capable of measuring above 1Gbps. Here's an article that describes our use of this 10Gbps SOC in a little more detail: https://samknows.com/blog/arris-and-virgin-media-test-new-10...

I'd be perfectly happy with the performance boost if it only managed 3 Gbit.

Now we also gave 2.5/5 GbE which might be sensible as well. Ethernet has been stuck at 1 GbE for far too long and have skewed everything a bit.

Even the AMD specs just says two 10GbE ports, but nothing about it being an AMD design, or some third party controllers that are just included in the package.

AMD has previously made their own network controller chips, but in last 10 - 15 years or more, so I would be a little surprised if they now have a 10Gb design. Maybe I just haven't paid enough attention to AMD.

Zen has built-in AMD 10G NICs (using the amd-xgbe driver) but they're usually disabled so nobody talks about them.

It has controller for 10GbE port, but still depends on PC manufacturer to actually implement a (or two) PHY 10Gbase-T port(s). I doubt many would do, though I wish the manufaturers would deliver 2.5G or 5G in transition for less expensive and lower power parts.

To be honest, optic is soooo much cheaper than 10G-T. I've upgraded my home network to 10G in parts (not each link, but critical ones: for NAS and for my workstation) and everything is a lot cheaper with optics. Switch are much cheaper per port, transceivers are dirt-cheap on eBay, Intel X520-DA is cheaper (even if you add price of transceivers) than -T variant, not to mention old Mellanox cards.

If distance allows DAC patchcords are cheap too, and single-mod fiber cables with LC2 connectors cost almost as good twisted pair, only slightly more.

One disadvantage is that LC2 connectors are rather bulky and you could not install them yourself as easy as RJ45 ones, so if you need to route cable through very confined space, it could be a problem.

I've been using second hand Mellanox for about a decade or so and it's been phenomenal. Great speed, latency and stability.

Ditto. A few times I've had issues where I had compatibility issues until I upgraded the firmware on the card.

For a long time I used infiniband between fast systems just because the cards were available so cheaply, but now 40gbe is really cheap (and 100gbe is getting there).

I'm really not that fond of 10G-T, it's picky about cables and power hungry. Give me fiber or a dac cable any day.

Cheaper used, and not cheaper if you have to to actually pull and terminate OM4 cable. Plus, the long term costs tend to be higher, because optical SFPs are the modern equivalent of spinning rust when it comes to failure rates.

And the prices of 10GbaseT parts are falling too. And for home use, it runs just fine on quality cat5e.

It's been 20+ years since 1 GbE came around, 10 GbE came in 2006, but for some reason the adoption has lagged hugely in SMB/consumer gear.

1 Gbe is just marginally slower than consumer grade HDD and matches the fastest residential/SME internet connections. For most 1Gbe was a noticeable upgrade while 10Gbe isn't, while cost of hardware is noticeably higher.

10Gbe has decent adoption where it makes sense.

Modern systems have NVME SSDs which can easily fill a 10 gig connection, both read and write speed. It would be nice to see higher speed ethernet on more hardware. I have some 10 gig equipment but it's a couple generations old ebay special.

Disaggregated home SSD? Err, wow!

What do you mean by disaggregated?

SSD is certainly cheap enough for home NAS now.

One of my external HHDs can work at 250MB/s which means 2GbE. I'd like my home NAS to have at least a 2.5GbE NIC and my router/switch have to be 10GbE so as I don't saturate them while transferring from/to the NAS.

I also plan on adding a few 1080p@30fps security cameras and a centralised LAN host for all the video streams/backups. It will all add up quite quickly and I'm not even sure a home 10GbE setup will hold its own well in such conditions. I plan my buy an expensive switch/router combo with up to 320GbE bandwidth though, so it might work.

I believe 10GbE will be with us for as the de-facto prosumer setup for quite a while since 1.25GB/s is going to work for 99% of what's needed out there. (Although uncompressed 4k@60fps is almost 2GB/s...)

Its been an artificial market segmentation ploy used by a number of vendors. That ploy is now failing since the primary users of 10G have moved on to faster standards.

Now that I’ve been working on service provider routers for a bit, anything lower than 100G sounds slow. All about perspective, I suppose.

Ans we are finally starting to see residential high-speed internet at 1G becoming avaliable and widespread.

Bell Canada even offers 1.5Gbps internet and ships a router that only has 1GbE ports, so I had to jump through some hoops to remove the SFP+ from the router they gave me and get it working on my pfSense box. I'm still limited on most of my network to 1Gbps, but at least a few hardwired machines have access to the full 1.5Gbps/1.0Gbps and 10Gbps locally.

Things would be so much easier if all copper ports were at least 2.5Gbps, preferably 10Gbps.

That's some serious dedication!

I would like to upgrade my setup to higher speeds, but the cost of 2.5/5 Gbps networking gear is very difficult to justify. My entire kubernetes cluster is cheaper, and it's much better value/investment.

You could always bond a couple of 1Gbps ports together, not as elegant, but certainly something hackable with what you have perhaps and with that - cheaper and good stop gap to eek out a little bit more life.

I don't see why it wouldn't be able to drive them at full speed. Zen cores (even at that TDP) plus the standard Ethernet hardware offloading should be able to handle that and a lot of extra processing without trouble.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com