Subject: Re: The ultimate TOE design

From: Wes Felter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:35:31 -0500

Jeff Garzik wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 04:03:57PM -0500, Wes Felter wrote:
> 
>>To do 10 Gbps Ethernet with Jeff's approach, wouldn't you need a 5-10 
>>GHz processor on the card? Sounds expensive.
> 
> 
> Do you need a 5-10 Ghz Intel server to handle 10 Gbps ethernet?

Yes. (Or a 4-way ~2GHz server.)

When the fastest general-purpose processors cannot handle the fastest 
Ethernet links, putting such a processor on a NIC won't help much. I 
think this is why people are attracted to TOE ASICs, even if that isn't 
the right solution.

-- 
Wes Felter - [email-masked] - http://felter.org/wesley/