Is there such thing as 2.5GbE? Saw it on ARK.Intel

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cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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I have seen it when looking at switch chips. Ex. Seems to be more aimed at switch uplink/stacking, like 1GbE was in the 10/100 days.
 

mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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cx4 was 4 x 2.5gbps links. not too different than how scsi got wide (and ultra), and not to different from infiniband/40gbe using more links.

not easy to just go faster, but if you have many threads/connections, it is easy to go wide.
 

Aluminum

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Sep 7, 2012
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Yeah its so they can bond them to interface with a 10Gb link

All these wonderful cheap IB cards are doing the same thing at a hardware level
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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2.5Gbe doesn't really exist in the wild. However, Avoton and Rangerley are designed so that - given the right PHY - they could support 4x1Gbe or 1x10Gbe. You are also likely to see 4x2.5Gbe configurations when using dense-pack chassis that have dedicated embedded switches (e.g., Moonshot or SM's 6u chassis). This level of flexibility is the main reason that Intel didn't embed the PHY onto the SoC.
 

cactus

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2.5Gbe doesn't really exist in the wild. However, Avoton and Rangerley are designed so that - given the right PHY - they could support 4x1Gbe or 1x10Gbe. You are also likely to see 4x2.5Gbe configurations when using dense-pack chassis that have dedicated embedded switches (e.g., Moonshot or SM's 6u chassis). This level of flexibility is the main reason that Intel didn't embed the PHY onto the SoC.
It makes no sense from a power budget point of view either if their target market is the Moonshot style system that can use SGMII on the backplane.
 

PigLover

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It makes no sense from a power budget point of view either if their target market is the Moonshot style system that can use SGMII on the backplane.
Moonshot's primary internal interconnect is Ethernet based, with four links per cartridge wired for up to 10Gbe speeds (two links to each of the two redundant switch modules). They also have a high-speed taurus interconnect (legacy of DEC Alpha designs) but that is for specialized HPC applications by providing a high-speed link to each of your six "neighbors", but it isn't a general purpose interconnect.

I have no idea how the SM 6u chassis is wired - but based on their press release it sounds like its Ethernet based too.
 

cactus

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I worded that poorly; "could" would have been better. I did not know what Moonshot was using for interconnect. Interesting information on Moonshot though.