Well, if this is what Asrock is using to provide 2.5GbE, that can only be a good sign. The (current) Aquantia devices don’t seem cost-effective enough to add to a lot of motherboards. If manufacturers can easily swap existing Realtek GbE with this new part, it might finally drive 2.5GbE availability, creating demand for cheaper consumer-grade 2.5GbE switches and routers, and break us out of the current chicken and egg problem...
Amazon? They are actually pretty affordable compared to a few years ago. If you want to just connect a server and main PC for example can be done for just a couple hundred dollars. More than gig speed in price sure..but compared to used to be $500 for a NIC and $1000 for a switch its a LOT more practical now.
The problem with any of this is easy to see, manufacturers won't adopt it much without a need..currently %99 of people don't need faster speeds than what we got. That and most houses have to actually rewire to take advantage. Despite what most people think, most houses don't have anything better than Cat 3 in them.
Not sure why most homes would even get dedicated network wiring given the commonplace availability of wireless and the need for occasional, costly gutting to update to new standards. Even copper phone wiring is of questionable value since a large number of households are cellular only. I still rely on POTS for DSL, but I also accept that I'm in an unusual position as I lack cable Internet access in my area. For those that must have wired signals, bridging Ethernet to electrical wiring is generally sufficient to get WiFi to places that are otherwise difficult to reach via a centrally-based wireless router. So, at least where residential networking is concerned, the future is not in wired Ethernet.
When I bought my house ~11 years ago, one of the selling issues they had was that the phone wiring was not working right, and I was like "Welp, I have never had a land line before, don't see why it would be an issue now". 11 years later I have only gotten rid of wires coming to an in my home rather than adding them.
I know this is a old post, but saw link back to it. What you just said is %100 false. Every new home built now has dedicated CAT6 connections to almost every room. Ethernet is and always will be prefered over wireless. Wireless is still complete shit and fails a LOT.
I had no idea that Realtek was in the business of packet prioritization software. At least its from a first party OEM that makes the hardware rather than a rebranding company like Rivet Networks, but I still can't see any actual value in doing that at the system's Ethernet controller unless you do a lot of LAN-only gaming, but at that point latency isn't a serious issue since the traffic doesn't have to traverse much wire or many hub/switch/router gear. Scaling up to 2.5Gbps is a good thing. Intel needs credible and cost-effective competition that can spur the growth of cheap switches and routers.
Gamers would not have been my first guess. It seems to me that most games are designed to work well over an internet connection, and it is a minority of internet connections that are above 100 Mbps, so 1 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps would both be overkill on the bandwidth needed for gaming. Maybe you get a smallest of latency boosts in a LAN, but not likely any benefit for online gaming.
The bigger usage scenario is content creators trying to shuffle their gigabyte sized video clips around the network. I just copied a 3 GB clip and it took almost 25 seconds. Dropping that down to 10 seconds would be excellent.
The bigger picture though is that 2.5 becomes the new minimum for switches and motherboards and eventually network storage is as fast as a spinning HDD. For office environments that could be a huge benefit.
Of course 10G would ultimately be best, but not if everything has to have big heat sinks everywhere to make them all work.
I sort of feel like for this to become mainstream we need to start seeing 8 and 16 port 2.5 Gbps switches with a couple 10 Gbps backbone connectors, in the $200 price range.
I can see the CPU load now. As much as I dislike Realtek's NICs, I see this as a sign of the times as 2.5/5 Ethernet matures.
But really. High end Realtek 1Gb NIC will use 70% of my CPU, making my computer stutter while the Intel NIC hangs around 0.5% and I don't even notice the 114MiB/s SMB transfer while playing video games.
Wondering about Realtek's legendary OSS support... My older hardware usually ends up doing NAS or routing duties so if I pickup a board that has a realtek controller its usually a trip to aliexpress/baba for a noname intel chipset NIC.... (as a side note has anyone brought any of the 10G NICs from Ali and had good experiences with them? The price of switches continues to dampen higher than 1Gb adoption imho...)
I don't care how they market it, as long as people start buying so prices drop. I could use the extra bandwidth to my fileserver, but haven't been willing to pay 10 G prices.
>1Gbit for gamers: A lot of that may just be for bragging rights, which is fine with me: If they commoditize the hardware it gets cheaper for all of us.
On the other hand network speeds can be important e.g. when you run a local ARK evolved server for the loading of the world.
Other than that, I tend to get less than 500MB/s on my 10Gbit Aquantias, simply because few of the sources/sinks are capable delivering more. Sole exception being FusionIO and a NVMe unit.
I do like the idea of doing notebook backups (typically SSD) at more than 100MB/s using the USB variant.
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shelbystripes - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Well, if this is what Asrock is using to provide 2.5GbE, that can only be a good sign. The (current) Aquantia devices don’t seem cost-effective enough to add to a lot of motherboards. If manufacturers can easily swap existing Realtek GbE with this new part, it might finally drive 2.5GbE availability, creating demand for cheaper consumer-grade 2.5GbE switches and routers, and break us out of the current chicken and egg problem...iwod - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Yes, hopefully 2.5G will be standard within a few years time and not as a premium.colinstu - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Where are the 2.5G/5G/10G switches.....imaheadcase - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Amazon? They are actually pretty affordable compared to a few years ago. If you want to just connect a server and main PC for example can be done for just a couple hundred dollars. More than gig speed in price sure..but compared to used to be $500 for a NIC and $1000 for a switch its a LOT more practical now.The problem with any of this is easy to see, manufacturers won't adopt it much without a need..currently %99 of people don't need faster speeds than what we got. That and most houses have to actually rewire to take advantage. Despite what most people think, most houses don't have anything better than Cat 3 in them.
PeachNCream - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Not sure why most homes would even get dedicated network wiring given the commonplace availability of wireless and the need for occasional, costly gutting to update to new standards. Even copper phone wiring is of questionable value since a large number of households are cellular only. I still rely on POTS for DSL, but I also accept that I'm in an unusual position as I lack cable Internet access in my area. For those that must have wired signals, bridging Ethernet to electrical wiring is generally sufficient to get WiFi to places that are otherwise difficult to reach via a centrally-based wireless router. So, at least where residential networking is concerned, the future is not in wired Ethernet.CaedenV - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
When I bought my house ~11 years ago, one of the selling issues they had was that the phone wiring was not working right, and I was like "Welp, I have never had a land line before, don't see why it would be an issue now".11 years later I have only gotten rid of wires coming to an in my home rather than adding them.
close - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
But then you wouldn't care much about wired 2.5G+ and the associated switches anyway.imaheadcase - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link
I know this is a old post, but saw link back to it. What you just said is %100 false. Every new home built now has dedicated CAT6 connections to almost every room. Ethernet is and always will be prefered over wireless. Wireless is still complete shit and fails a LOT.piroroadkill - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
Netgear ms510tx..If you only want 2.5Gbit, it can provide FIVE of those, as well as four 1 Gig ports.
PeachNCream - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
I had no idea that Realtek was in the business of packet prioritization software. At least its from a first party OEM that makes the hardware rather than a rebranding company like Rivet Networks, but I still can't see any actual value in doing that at the system's Ethernet controller unless you do a lot of LAN-only gaming, but at that point latency isn't a serious issue since the traffic doesn't have to traverse much wire or many hub/switch/router gear. Scaling up to 2.5Gbps is a good thing. Intel needs credible and cost-effective competition that can spur the growth of cheap switches and routers.LeftSide - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Are the 2.5 and 5g compatible with POE? I’m thinking the next generation of wireless APs are going to need more than 1g.thewishy - Saturday, October 6, 2018 - link
Yes, and that was one of the main use cases for multigig - APs. That said I think wired backhaul will become less common in the age of mesh.In any case, even a simple desktop to NAS filecopy has become constrained by gigabit
pixelstuff - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Gamers would not have been my first guess. It seems to me that most games are designed to work well over an internet connection, and it is a minority of internet connections that are above 100 Mbps, so 1 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps would both be overkill on the bandwidth needed for gaming. Maybe you get a smallest of latency boosts in a LAN, but not likely any benefit for online gaming.The bigger usage scenario is content creators trying to shuffle their gigabyte sized video clips around the network. I just copied a 3 GB clip and it took almost 25 seconds. Dropping that down to 10 seconds would be excellent.
The bigger picture though is that 2.5 becomes the new minimum for switches and motherboards and eventually network storage is as fast as a spinning HDD. For office environments that could be a huge benefit.
Of course 10G would ultimately be best, but not if everything has to have big heat sinks everywhere to make them all work.
I sort of feel like for this to become mainstream we need to start seeing 8 and 16 port 2.5 Gbps switches with a couple 10 Gbps backbone connectors, in the $200 price range.
bcronce - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
I can see the CPU load now. As much as I dislike Realtek's NICs, I see this as a sign of the times as 2.5/5 Ethernet matures.But really. High end Realtek 1Gb NIC will use 70% of my CPU, making my computer stutter while the Intel NIC hangs around 0.5% and I don't even notice the 114MiB/s SMB transfer while playing video games.
WatcherCK - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Wondering about Realtek's legendary OSS support... My older hardware usually ends up doing NAS or routing duties so if I pickup a board that has a realtek controller its usually a trip to aliexpress/baba for a noname intel chipset NIC.... (as a side note has anyone brought any of the 10G NICs from Ali and had good experiences with them? The price of switches continues to dampen higher than 1Gb adoption imho...)GreenReaper - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
Looks like no in-tree driver currently uses the 2.5Gbit or 5Gbit entries added in January 2017:https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/721627/
I guess we'll just have to wait for the new PHY to be added here:
https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/dri...
There are pictures of the USB dongle and PCIe card here:
https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/event/112...
brunis.dk - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
Increasing LAN bandwidth from 1 Gb to 2,5 Gb targets gaming? Some of these marketing morons need to be punched in the face.mode_13h - Saturday, October 6, 2018 - link
I don't care how they market it, as long as people start buying so prices drop. I could use the extra bandwidth to my fileserver, but haven't been willing to pay 10 G prices.abufrejoval - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
>1Gbit for gamers: A lot of that may just be for bragging rights, which is fine with me: If they commoditize the hardware it gets cheaper for all of us.On the other hand network speeds can be important e.g. when you run a local ARK evolved server for the loading of the world.
Other than that, I tend to get less than 500MB/s on my 10Gbit Aquantias, simply because few of the sources/sinks are capable delivering more. Sole exception being FusionIO and a NVMe unit.
I do like the idea of doing notebook backups (typically SSD) at more than 100MB/s using the USB variant.