Mellanox SX6005 & SX6012 56Gbps 12 port switch pricing revealed

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

renderfarmer

Member
Feb 22, 2013
249
1
18
New Jersey
Hi all.

I contacted Mellanox about pricing on the upcoming SX6005 and SX6012 12 port IB switches and thought I'd share what they replied:

SX6005: $6,652 MSRP
SX6012: $9,022 MSRP

Street price for Mellanox switches is typically 55-70% depending on the reseller.

Based on that and my personal needs I think the IS5023 18port managed 40Gbps switch is a much better value (street; $3500) even if all I need is 12 ports. Any thoughts?
 
Last edited:

jmarg

New Member
Feb 28, 2013
6
0
0
Consider FDR IB (56Gbps) is 2x the bandwidth of QDR (40Gbps).

Why you might ask?

With bit-encoding (8b/10b), 40Gbps IB has actual speed of 32Gbps.
Also, with PCIe 2.0, you are limited more to about 26Gbps.
With FDR IB, the bit encoding was changed to 64/66b, so you get closer to 54.03 Gbps, and PCIe 3.0 is closer to 54Gbps.
 

cactus

Moderator
Jan 25, 2011
830
75
28
CA
Where do you get the 26Gbps for PCI-e 2.0? Signaling rate for 8x 2.0 is 40GT, minus 20% overhead for encoding gets you ~32Gbps usable bandwidth. You then have protocol overhead, but that is present on both PCI-e and IB.

I find it interesting that PCI-e skipped 64/66 for 128/130(PCI-e 3).
 
Last edited:

renderfarmer

Member
Feb 22, 2013
249
1
18
New Jersey
Hmm. Interesting. I may just wait it out for the FDR switches. All of my servers have PCIe3 and the price difference wouldn't be all that big. thanks to both of you for the comments.
 

cactus

Moderator
Jan 25, 2011
830
75
28
CA
Do these advantages still hold if I'm only going to use these in Windows (possibly linux) on an IP network?
FDR is faster QDR whatever way you look at it, but because of the new encoding in both PCI-e and Infiniband, the increase in throughput is greater than the 16Gbps advertised.