[Beowulf] SC|05: will 10Ge beat IB?

[Mark Hahn]

> Chelsio's T210-CX4 TOE NIC has been around for about a year. Like the 
> Myricom product it utilizes the 10GBase-CX standard. It essentially 
> pushes 10GbE over InfiniBand cabling directly using the XAUI interface 
> (normally used for on-PCB communication on 10G devices).

indeed, it's CX4 that I was seeing all over the place.  yes, it's a 
pretty heavy/thick cable, and not cheap, and limited to ~15M.
but for clusters, 15M is pretty workable.

> relatively cheap UTP cabling and are limited to 50ft per link. It seems 
> to me to be a stopgap standard that will be overtaken by 10Gbase-T in a 
> few years time.

is there really a promise of running 10G on something like cat5?

> I don't have a quote on the pricing but it should be competitive with 
> IB.

my understanding is that an IB cable has some active equalization
built into the connectors, and that this is the only difference between
it and eth-style CX4.  I also understand that putting the equalization
on the cable size have been a design mistake, since it means that distortion
caused by the connector itslef is not corrected...