No, that would be called 10GbE. Thunderbolt is not 10 Gb Ethernet. As our devices become more interconnected in the home and Internet connection speeds are becoming faster, 10 GbE is becoming something that is actually necessary in the home and it shouldn't be too long until we start seeing consumer devices that support it. 100 GbE is now being used in the most demanding applications and development of Terabit Ethernet is under way. It's not hard to imagine that 10 GbE will start moving into the consumer space.
There is a separate channel for the display data. You can read Anandtech's Pegasus Promise R6 review where they put in 6 SSDs and achieved data throughput of nearly 10 Gb/s, but the display etc still worked fine.
InfiniBand is what's being used there, not 100GigE. Not even 40GigE. And 10gb/s InfiniBand is cheaper than 10gb/s ethernet. There are problems getting ethernet to scale at higher speeds including 10gb/s, so it seems increasingly clear there will need to be topology changes - and in effect ethernet is being reinvented but given the same name.
I am not quite following. Are you suggesting that 100 GbE is not being used in demanding applications?
and so forth.
It seems that I am, although in retrospect it's incorrect to categorically say 100GigE is not being used at all. And actually it's somewhat misleading to consider it ethernet at all because the link layer is totally different. Already 10GigE consumes a lot of CPU dealing with protocol overhead - it's just not scalable. InfiniBand doesn't have this problem. I don't think it's unfair to consider 100GigE implementations to be something of a closed-loop trial.
Right, instead I should probably have taken more exception to the notion that 10GigE is something presently, or in the very near future, necessary in the home.
As long as the Ethernet Alliance keeps calling it Ethernet, then I don't really care.
I am not sure why you would think that. My near future is about 2 years and there is definitely a need to go beyond 1 GbE for home users, considering how the world is moving. Sure, over here in the UK we are behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to broadband speeds, but that does not mean the rest of the world has to suffer.
Home users have only incidentally arrived at GigE because the economics of GigE over Fast Ethernet made it compelling to provide it before there was widespread need. Most home "modems" for DSL or cable are at best 100Mb/s, many are still at 10Mb/s. Also home users are substantially more likely to use wireless connections, which is significantly bandwidth constrained even compared to GigE let alone 10GigE. I don't at all see the use case beyond niche.
South Korea is the world leader in internet bandwidth provided to the most people. Most of this has to do with government policies. Even there, they are nowhere near 1000Gb/s speed. Experiments have started with GigE speeds, but the average is 17Mb/s with a peak of almost 50Mb/s. [1]
I am not suggesting that Internet speeds will all of a sudden jump to 1 Gbps and that's not at all the main reason why I think we'll start to see 10 GbE moving into the consumer space. It's more to throw data around the house like streaming etc from and to multiple devices. Wi-fi is a big pain and I'll reserve my judgement on 802.11 ac until we see some real world tests. I can put my computer right next to a 450 Mb/s router running on an un-congested 5 GHz channel and I still get around 11-12 MB/s.
I don't buy it. Not yet anyway. 10GigE is in the realm of bandwidth required for raw uncompressed video editing. Not pushing files around the house. Most high end homes now aren't even being build with ethernet anymore. In big houses, I'd expect to see WDS before Cat 5e/6.
Certainly even the amateur photographer would like to have better than 100+MB/s to their NAS, which then makes NAS a more clear win. It's better than direct attach storage in every respect except performance over GigE. (Not that it's all that slow, it's about that of FW800 if you use async NFS, but it does suffer a lot more if you use AFP or SMB.)
