Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE network adapter is coming to motherboards later this year
Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE network adapter is coming to motherboards later this year
This is going to be a huge help for home video editors.
I recently started using USB 3.2 2x2 (20Gbps) and it's orgasmic experience to what I had before
but home Internet is still stuck at Gigabit speeds.... and only in some cases are they maybe letting you go to 2 Gb. Wasn't there that post floating around lemmy a while ago about how China can potentially give everyone like 5Gb for home or something? Can't find it now but swore it was here....
I think 10GbE is more intended for local applications than for internet. Say, you have a NAS with a RAID array of nvme drives for video editing purposes that you want to access from a few workstations.
Even the other day I was quite happy to have 2.5GbE when I installed my new gaming PC, and steam was able to pull all my games directly from my old computer rather than downloading them over the internet again.
Anyway, LAN speeds have always been an order of magnitude higher than common internet speeds, so I don't see the issue.
Yes, this is the chicken and egg logic we have been served for the last 25 years that we have spent locked at 1 gigabit. This is because commercial players still had money left to milk to 10GBe deployments and 25 years later it it becoming obsolete in these environment. So we can have the free upgrade to 10GBe as the commercial deployments switch to 25, 40 and 100 GBe.
The thing manufacturer want to avoid collectively is product line cannibalization. And that means making sure that 10GBe was not the port you find on every random computer.
Of course, with the cloudification of general purpose computing. Most people in their homes just need a browser and streaming desktop client. So there could be other forces at play at preventing high speed LAN proliferation.
Imagine if a company could just make a 100$ nvme drive you can connect into your home router and it "just working". No cloud, no serves, no redirect. It opens the port, update IP dns client, update certificates, works everywhere.
10 Gb connections are widely available in Europe for very reasonable prices.
The China article was true that they launched the service, but bullshit they are the fastest.
Plenty of other countries are running 10GB and faster services you can get to your home.
Sweden for example
Same in Norway, many providers have been offering 10Gb for a while now.
That depends on where you live. I could get 10 Gbit/s WAN if I wanted to pay the subscription for that but 500 Mbit/s is enough.
Also 10 Gbit/s is mainly useful for LAN. Like connecting to a NAS.
I don't disagree with that. There is almost no benefit to having residential Internet go beyond even 2Gb. Most people don't realize that or are not shown why and so immediately figure that a bigger number means better experience. I use a 10Mb LAN connection to my Giagabit router at home and the only time I really suffer is when downloading huge files but I end up doing so in the background anyway...
Yeah, Im excited about the cards but getting a 1GB switch with a 10g uplink was expensive... 10g switches are... a lot.
ATT Fiber offers 5G for residential, though I've seen people posting speedtests of 10G speeds which I'm not sure how they got because it was on the DIY fiber ONT discord lol
About damn time. We got a boost every few years from 10 to 100 to 1000. Then we just... Stopped. Stagnated. It's understandable why, for a good long time one gigabit was all anybody needed, 100 MByte/sec is pretty good even for a NAS.
Of course then fiber ISPs got in the game, now in a lot of places you can buy 7-8gbps as a consumer product. And even multi-gig, which was supposed to 'fix' this, really ended up being insufficient. You could make a salad argument that multi gig was a waste of time and we should have just started moving to 10 gig.
Unfortunately, 10 gig switches still carry a significant premium. But this will start to shake that up. Sooner the better.
100MB/s are frustrating for a NAS. SSDs have been common for a decade, and the old spinning rust storage in my NAS is still faster than the network can handle?
Even HDDs can max a 100mbit connection. UHD Blurray is something like 80-150mbit/a.
Realtek are monsters of semiconductor creation.
Destroyed
What's next?
If only they were also monsters of incrementing the pcie device id when their chip revision breaks compatibility.
So you don't spend forever trying to Google on your phone or other laptop that you have to pull and rebuild the latest kernel, without an internet connection, because only that one knows that revision K needs power management set before the link will come up.
Literally anyone else could have done this. They all chose not to. So fuck them.
I think they're making a bit of a joke here. It's just progress.
Oh please do printer interface.
Right up there battling broadcom for worst.
Rtlsdr too
Can we finally get some affordable 10GbE switches too?
Right?! Most affordable 10G switches are SFP+ which requires a lot more research to make sure you get the right modules and cabling.
Just use DACs within the rack. Single mode fiber patches and SFP+ optics are also cheap and easy to find.
A lot of those modules would work fine if the companies didn't fuck with their drivers.
The Linux ixgbe driver (for Intel 82598 and 82599 chipsets) was submitted with a whitelist for Intel SFP+ adapters. Linux devs added a module option to shut off the whitelist, and tons of stuff is perfectly compatible.
Cisco c3850-12x48u is about $150 on eBay.
The main problem is the idle power consumption. About 150w with nothing plugged in.
what is "affordable" to you? there are $100-$300 10GbE switches out there.
It's impressive that they got the power consumption down to less than 2 watts. I think this is the first 10GBASE-T NIC I've seen that doesn't have a heatsink on it.
And they did it on Cat5e! I have a Cat5e “trunk” that I really don’t want to try to restring, but it’s a choke point that I’d like to upgrade from 1Ge. If only someone will build SOHO switches with it
Excellent!
Now if we can only teach realtek how pci device id's work, so they don't use revision id's to control power management, and links silently don't come up if your kernel driver doesn't support it properly.
I know this was a decade ago, but yeah, I'm still pretty damn pissed.
Wasn't it Realtek who made 1GbE popular as well by making the cheap 8111 IC over two decades ago?
And fucked it up by releasing the 8169 with a stepping change that added power management.
The kernel driver didn't know this, so links would silently not come up, and you wouldn't know why till you googled and learned you had to rebuild your kernel for your new motherboard.
Great to (maybe) see 10GbE coming and the initial price sounds reasonable compared to currently avaipable 2.5G and 5G Realtek adapters.
Apparently Linux 6.16 will have the driver included.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Realtek-RTL8127A
Realtek itself has demonstrated its RTL8127 NIC working with an unknown switch using cheap CAT5E cables, and the company’s representatives at the booth emphasised this fact. However, we do not know which switch or router the company used. Yet, most 10GbE routers and switches are designed for CAT6 cabling.
Funny update about the cabling they used during the demo. There's really no reason Cat 5e couldn't work for short enough distances with little interference. It's more about the guaranteed minimum distance you can get, 55m with Cat 6 and the full 100m for any rating beyond that.
I am just wondering if it would be better to go straight to fiber instead of ethernet as most have fiber to the home anyway. That should help with future speed upgrades beyond 10Gbit as well.
Fiber is also more power efficient? Why not?
I don't think "most" have fiber to the home, first of all. Cable companies in the US do multigig speeds via fiber to a relay and coax cable to the home. Fiber is great when it's underground or in a data center and safe, but it is delicate and easy to break the cables so not a great home solution. Fiber terminations are difficult and more expensive. The power efficiency payoff on a 1m cable from your router to your pc is probably going to be measured decades, more if you factor in the higher cost of the cable.
My fiber is also directly to the box on the side of the house. There inside is a modem with an Ethernet port that connects to the panel in the garage. Every home in our county has fiber like this afaik
I have fiber directly into my house. My PC is on the opposite end from the modem. This comment is a load of baloney
An SFP+ single mode module alone costs ~20€ at least. Add to that a PCIe extension card and you're way over the cost of copper.
Add to that, that most homes have multiple devices that you want connected. So you need a fiber switch as well. 150usd will get you a mikrotik crs305, with 4 sfp+ ports. And you'll probably want a router, but perhaps you can offload that to your ISP, kinda like routing on a stick.
You need more than10Gb/s at home? I mean we all know the 640Kb meme but I'm curious here :-)
At least it's not Marvell. But, man, can we pay another 17c and get .... I guess not Broadcom as they're waxing seriously dinkish, but who else?
Intel is probably still the gold standard. I'd pay a few bucks more to have something much more reliable.
Intel is probably still the gold standard.
I guess you're not familiar with the i225-v and its variants. Intel burned their reputation for good NICs with that fiasco.
Ever since the BE200 debacle I don't know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that's already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?
Serious question: What do you use a 10GbE adapter for? Are there ISPs which offer 10gigabit bandwidth? I suppose it would be useful on a LAN
edit:
Yeah, imagine a network backup system that could actually back up your 20 TB media center in a few hours rather than several days.
E.g., NAS on my LAN, especially for streaming high res video to devices in my house.
you're streaming over a Gb worth of video? even a full 4k blu ray rip is less than 1/10 of that.
My gigabit connection is good enough for my NAS, as the read speeds on the hard drive itself tend to be limited to about a gigabit/s anyway. But I could see some kind of SSD NAS benefiting from a faster LAN connection.
LAN for sure.
Old meme is old. I'm in Central Wyoming with reasonably priced 2Gb/s FTTH and I could order 10Gb/s if I wanted it.
There are multiple ISPs that offer 10Gbps Internet service in Japan and South Korea, I imagine other densely populated cities might have them also. There is also the Swiss ISP that offers 25Gbps Internet service since 2021.
Though I agree it is probably more used for LANs.
Bro, tell that my German table first.
Example of an ISP providing 10Gb/s in Portugal here and at 15 euros a month it's pretty cheap too.
That same ISP is from Romania and is also in Spain though curiously in this latter their Net Only 10Gb/s subscription costs €25 per month,
Personally I don't see the point of it for myself at home, but for a small business I can see it making sense.
8gbps here in USA... Quantum fiber.
I know of a few others in my area as well... Google Fiber, AT&T is offering 5gbps I think... Wyyerd is a local-ish one that's offering 8gbps...
ISPs in Switzerland offer up to 10 or 25Gbit over fiber.
https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/
But even within a LAN it really allows using a NAS for anything, not just slow access data.
I connect my primary and backup servers on 10G directly via a crossover cable for transferring ZFS snapshots. No actual 10G switches or anything at the moment but if I add any more servers I need to back up I'll probably get a small 10G switch to put in between.
I’m backing up my physical media so I pretty regularly move hundreds of GB around. That would take forever on a 1G network.
I also take a ton of GoPro video(skydiving/motorcycle). An hour of 360 footage is ~50GB. So just moving that around is cumbersome.
I have a 5G fiber connection and even my wireless access point(AP) is 10G. Sure, you can’t get that to a single device(WiFi) but my phone connects at 2.4G up/down. So ~3 modern phones downloading games or whatever has the possibility to saturate my internet connection. They could saturate the AP by downloading media from my backups for offline playback for a flight or whatever.
My ISP (Bouygues, in France) offers 8Gbps at no additional cost over 1Gbps.
Realtek, don’t they have issues with drivers in FreeBSD? Or am I horribly out of date.
In any case I’m excited, even if i barely tap into 1gbe capability most of the time.
Not sure if they provide official drivers for FreeBSD. Intel is usually a safer bet in that case.
Realtek Freebsd drivers are 'ok' now, but that was a long fight.
Outside of wifi (I mean Jesus christ) most of freebsd networking got fixed a decade ago, but you still need to stick with common-ish gear.
Freebsd on kvm though, that's a game breaker, especially with sriov mellanox.
To make use of a 10Gb network, wouldn't I also need all of my equipment in between things to support 10Gb? Where am I supposed to get a 10Gb modem for residential use?
modem
You don't need 10GbE WAN to make use of it on your LAN. If you have a lot of internal traffic (self hosting, for example), you really just need an internal router and some switches to support it. It's more convenient to have your modem be your main router, but that'd not necessary.
I use 10GbE for my internal network for my Ceph cluster. I’ve come about 80% of theoretical maximum for brief spikes from my NVMe drives rebalancing (mostly HDDs, few SSDs, couple NVMes).
Last part that I need is for SSDs to come down in price to where ~80TB isn't too ridiculous (that's 40TB usable space with RAID1). Cut the price per TB in half two more times to make it there. Otherwise, spinning platters are the bottleneck with my 10Gb network.
Which probably would have happened in the next few years if not for tariffs.
Even without tariffs, the collusion between nand manufacturers to keep prices high meant 2030 would be the earliest that 8tb SSDs would be "affordable"
Where am I supposed to get a 10Gb modem for residential use?
There are a few routers that have SFP+ slots so you can modulate to any laser signal your provider might require.
Otherwise if you're looking for strictly only a modem there are various available. They are usually simply called fiber to ethernet converter. Startek, Delock, Trendnet, FS
If you meant a switch, well 10G switches are abundant. Zyxel, Netgear, TP-Link all the usual suspects.
as if more than .005% of computer users will actually be able to see any difference whatsoever.
