14 DAY TRIAL // If an Internet connection means a line to the outside world, a 10 Gigabit line represents a fully fledged open highway with five or six lanes and nobody to bother you. This technology is something that a little while back we used to look with our eyes open and say "we'll never need such high data transfer rates". Well, you know what they say, never say never, because the applications for the home user might seem limited only because the transfer rate is higher than one hard drive can support, and such technology usually implies having an array of hard drives linked in a RAID matrix.
But the applications of very fast connections such as an cable ethernet connection go beyond the simple file downloading from the Internet or playing network games. For some of the fiber channel technologies, there is also the option of one day replacing the wiring in a motherboard, due to the same dreaded transfer rate. And companies in the networking business have to rely on the same copyright patents as the processor manufacturers have to, whenever you have an idea, you'll find out somebody else had it before you did, I think one of Murphy's laws states the same thing.
Marvell, for instance, has signed a licensing agreement with Sun Microsystems through which they are going to build and sell high-performance networking products based on Sun's Multithreaded 10 Gigabit Ethernet Networking Technology. This technology is the first one designed to optimize throughput between multithreaded processors and networking-to-enterprise servers.
David Young, vice president and general manager, Connectivity Business Unit, Communications and Consumer Business Unit at Marvell said that: "Our customers clearly understand the bottlenecks that occur at the 'on ramps' to the network as multicore and multithreaded CPUs generate more network traffic. Sun's architecture creates a way to efficiently break those bottlenecks by multithreading the network interface to increase throughput. Marvell's broad customer base in the communications and storage markets will benefit from this innovative technology."