More and more chipset manufacturers include at least one Ethernet connection to go with a trendy motherboard. This is not much more expensive than a regular 10/100 Mbps card and, if necessary, it can be purchased separately should you need more than your motherboard can offer. Nvidia and Intel are only two of the players that feature TCP/IP offload to widen the throughput at no extra cost in terms of processor usage.
Of course, as things evolve and applications as well as
multimedia content tend to become network hogs, users scream for bandwidth. That's not a really pressing issue anymore since the advent of fiber-optics networks that can push TCP/IP packets at dazzling speeds. Are we ready for the new, 10 Gbps network standard? Well it has long since rushed into reality, only that high infrastructure costs keep it away from regular use and makes it appealing for educational and military use.
Network giants are able to provide the user with the 10 Gigabit Ethernet, but the costs for NIC cards, switches and CX4 standard cabling would push prices over $2,000 or even $3,000. For our own convenience, Fulcrum has found the price-aware solution: the FX4000 single-chip 24-port full-bandwidth 10GE Ethernet switch.
It currently provides a 200 nanosecond port to port speed in Layer 2, or a layer 3 configuration that would increase the time to 300 nanoseconds. That's fast enough to bring 10GE closer to the desktop PC. That's not all, as the switch integrates a hardware firewall that would easily intercept and prevent Denial Of Service attacks and flood attempts.
The Fulcrum switch can send messages in under 2 microseconds, thus matching the InfiniBand speed, the possible next standard for networking. The slim switch would provide up to 48 10 Gbps ports, inexpensive enough for the labs and learning facilities to allow their students play networking.
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