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Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#41

Post by GeekyBear »

belthesar wrote: post #40
GeekyBear wrote: post #38

As mentioned in the blog post's footnote, the bottleneck may just be on the NAS side: > this real-world speed limitation could also be related to my use of my lower-power Arm NAS (running on Ampere Altra, with 32 fairly-slow CPU cores). I was testing writing to an array of fast enterprise NVMe SSDs, so they shouldn't be the bottleneck here. He was only getting 1 Gigabyte of throughput out of the built in 10 Gigabit E…

You're an order of magnitude off there. The 10 Gigabit connection was providing ~ 1 Gigabyte per second of throughput.

Fixed, thanks.

Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#42

Post by Palomides »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #3

It’s crazy that the Ethernet chips consume more power (presumably - because of the heat) than the processor in the computer. How is driving 25Gb/s such a hot task compared to driving multiple 40Gb/s Thunderbolt ports?

is 10W a lot of power? I absolutely don't believe the cpu is using less than that while pushing 25Gb out

you can look up the rated power use of a connectx4 card, they do a lot of offloaded computation, too

Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#43

Post by throw0101d »

wrs wrote: post #8
areoform wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3205-l... MacOS has supported RDMA over thunderbolt since March 19th.

That is just RDMA itself and seems to be aimed directly at distributed inference (no surprise there!). Now they need to update the SMB driver to make use of it.

For the record this is officially called "SMB Direct":

* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/fil...

* https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/smb/smbdirect.html

Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#44

Post by dlcarrier »

gorkish wrote: post #30
olavgg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, nfs with rdma will increase your performance significantly.

If your storage devices are native PCIe and your network is actually fast enough and your nics and switches have the proper hardware and driver support and your switches are properly configured and your nfs client and server configurations are tweaked just so , and you hold your face in just the right position The perf is amazing

I do have stable diffusion running on a non-Nvidia GPU, so I'm familiar with the manner of rituals required before contemplating installing system updates or even suspending the system.

Now, I'm off to determine if an eMMC M.2 module is a native PCIe device…

Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#45

Post by Neywiny »

I'm using the sonnet at work. Work paid for it. Yes it's more expensive. I have gotten over 25 gbps bidirectional, but not by much. Maybe 27. A big downside is that it only supports 15W upstream power which I didn't think to check, so since that laptop only has 2 usb-c ports for power input, it's a bit limiting.

The upside, though, was that I plugged it in, got my throughput, and never had to worry ever again. Remember that engineering time is mucho $$. So troubleshooting overheating, divising a solution, manufacturing it, etc, that all eats into the savings.

The $400 dock would be cool though. It seems smaller than the sonnet and fixes my charging problem. Weirdly I didn't think I'd care about not including transceivers but they did actually come in handy, so that is a downside. Might try to get one of these if I need another one in the future.

Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#46

Post by AnthonBerg »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #39
AnthonBerg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, it takes a bit of anger to get electromagnetism to wiggle that fast over copper. Imperfect transistors using their full operational envelope to control a sort of chaotic thing? Fields and stuff.

is thunderbolt not copper?

It doesn't get as long! Long copper.

Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#47

Post by hephaes7us »

SlavikCA wrote: post #10

What are typical use cases for needing 25Gbps? Author talks about 4k video, but AI tells me that for "4K production mastering (ProRes 422 HQ, 4:2:2, 10-bit)" the rate is under 2Gbps. I'm not saying it's not needed, - just curious.

NAS stuff can benefit greatly and straightforwardly.

A typical NVMe SSD can easily do sequential reads at 7GB/s, which outpaces a 25Gbps connection by more than 2x. NAS is more typically backed by SATA HDDs, but there's some relatively easy way to put an NVMe disk in front of them as a cache.

Do you ever _need_ it? Perhaps not, but there's plenty of common activities just stemming from NAS usage which see a linear speedup, and would continue to get faster up to 100Gbps even.

Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#48

Post by TacticalCoder »

> I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network,

Nothing against Jeff Geerling and I love his YouTube channel and I'm glad he's one of us HNer but this crop of circular "I make YouTube vids about big tx speeds and big NAS because I make vids hence I need big tx speeds and big NAS so I can speak about big tx speeds and big NAS because I make YouTube vids about big tx speeds and big NAS" videos is a bit tiring IMO.

I'm not into cryptocurrencies but, I don't know, host a full Ethereum node, host a Plex/Jellyfin server serving thousands of movies, host LLMs, etc.

I mean: talk about something else than editing vids because you make vids about vids.

Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

#49

Post by undersuit »

nutjob2 wrote: post #9

Somewhat off-topic: has anyone implemented USB C based networking? So for instance you have two or more machines that have USB 4 ports at 20 to 80 Gbps and you plug in the appropriate USB C cables to connect them. What do you need to make the connections appear as a (point to point) part of a regular TCP/IP network? Seems much cheaper than Ethernet if you already have the ports.

You're limited in your network topology because there is no USB Switch. This HN post used two USB4 connections to create a 3-node cluster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39003469
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