51–60 of 121 posts
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?
The NIC in this setup was released 12 years ago. It's built on a very old process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, raw RDMA is one thing, making sure other protocols can use it is another... hopefully Apple gets there, but right now SMB with RDMA is probably a tiny, tiny niche. I do wonder what Apple's custom-built servers are running for networking. I wish they still made Mac Pro-level chassis specifically for better IO. Thunderbolt 5 is nice, but far inferior to a PCIe x16 slot (which can hit 400 Gbps networking) nowadays…
If they were focused on the needs of the kind of person who moves enough terabytes of files around to need this kind of speed, we'd see them still making either computers with slots, or first-party 25Gbps networking.
I'm not really trying to criticize them for it -- Tim Cook's bean counters clearly did the math and they're certainly free to optimize their Mac R&D spend for things that'll sell college students MacBook Neos and Airs, rather than worrying about the MKBHDs, Linus Sebastians and Jeff Geerlings of the world (this is just a list of people I've seen using extremely fast networking).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Mac Studio is over 100 W while a 25G NIC is under 25 W (that's the power limit for a normal PCIe slot).
A normal x16 PCIe slot has always been able to supply up to 75w since the beginning.
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. Rememb…
I initially read this as SONET[1] and was seriously questioning your technical choices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking
> 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 tiri…
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. Rememb…
>I'm using the sonnet at work. I initially read this as SONET [1] and was seriously questioning your technical choices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking
what a man does in his own homelab, even if it does involve ATM, is none of our business.
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.
USB-4 is basically Thunderbolt right? Thunderbolt networking is pretty automatic on Macs at least: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchld53dd2f5/...
Thunderbolt 4 is profile with USB4 tunneling, 40Gbps speed, and 100W power. Thunderbolt 5 is 80Gbps and 240W power.
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.
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.