back to article Ethernet boffins get ready to kick off 400G development

After a year of discussion and setting of baseline specifications, the hard work of creating 400G bps Ethernet is about to begin. This month, according to the acting chair of the IEEE's 400G Ethernet study group, Dell's John D'Ambrosia, the group will be seeking approval of the project documentation it's been developing since …

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  1. Steve Knox
    Joke

    So...

    In a few years time,could we be seeing 400Gbps FCoEoF?

    1. foo_bar_baz

      Re: So...

      Funny, but it's not Ethernet over Fiber. Fiber and copper are both part of the Ethernet standard. No I didn't downvote you, just being pedantic.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So...

      Well yes, this is another good reason why FCoIP is almost always a better choice than FC....

  2. Denarius
    Happy

    eventually even load a rich content web site

    without timeouts or growing old. May it be soon, title says it all

    1. Khaptain Silver badge

      Re: eventually even load a rich content web site

      Unfortunately that "rich" content will just become richer..... the marketing bods have no pride.

  3. Canecutter

    Well, then!

    400 Gb/s, eh? That is about 400 bits per foot of interconnect length; 400 bits per nanosecond.

    I'd hate to be the guy who has to troubleshoot a network built to those specs.

    1. Herby

      Re: Well, then!

      Yes, with the spacing, the bits are less than 1mm apart. This means that in a distance of about 12 meters, you have an entire (standard) ethernet frame.

      The problems with "frames in transit" starts to make things difficult. Go longer distances and limits of TCP become evident.

      So, generally nice for in rack communications, longer distances start to be problematical.

      As consumers, 100Base-T works quite well, but doesn't satisfy those who believe "Instant gratification isn't soon enough".

      1. Christian Berger

        Re: Well, then!

        Well yes, but we already have that problem on the Internet right now. You have 100ms latency for intercontinental links and 100 MBit connections (in cheap data-centres or with end users in developed countries like Turkey). So you easily have a megabyte in transit.

        Obviously there is a reason for Gigabit Ethernet for consumers. It allows much faster file transfers. Realistically you can pipe 50 Megabytes per second even with consumer equipment. It's relevant if copying your file takes 1 or 5 hours.

  4. Ted Treen
    Alert

    Wow...

    If my employer installs that, I can only imagine how much more quickly Lotus Notes will be able to tell me it can't find the server...

  5. harmjschoonhoven

    What use?

    Short distance 400G bps Ethernet may be useful for CERN, the Square Kilometer Array or have a roll as the backbone of a supercomputer. 'Normal' hardware cannot feed a connection like this.

    In broadcast facilities underground tunnels with hundreds of parallel optical fibers are used. There is nothing wrong with that.

    1. bazza Silver badge

      Re: What use?

      Well, it's not that far off 'Normal'. 400Gbps is going to pan at at less than 50GByte/s, and there's Intel CPUs that have that much memory bandwidth (certainly when inter-leaved across multiple CPU sockets). The second requirement is for a CPU -> peripheral bus that's equally fat, and that's only a matter of bus width ultimately.

      So we're not far away from it being "Normal" at all, especially as anything reasonable NIC in this class would offer TCP offload facilities. Give it a few years and it will seem routine.

      It does raise an interesting point. If Ethernet is the fastest interconnect we have, people will start using it inside computer architectures instead of PCI or whatever.

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