Energy Efficient Ethernet

This just came to my attention, the IEEE 802.3 has formed a study group to investigate on Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE). This study group met for the first time at the IEEE meets at Monterey. This effort is being led mainly by scientists from the Lawrence Brekeley National Laboratory, and includes participation from Cisco and Broadcom.

The outstanding issues document available here is an interesting read. It mentions that EEE will save 250 to 380 million $s a year from 1 Gig Ethernet and 40 to 80 million $s a year from 10 Gig Etehrnet. The main idea here is that Ethernet cards should be able to switch to lower data rates when link utilization is low. As an example, 1 Gig cards should be able to switch quickly between rates of 10 Mbps, 100 Mpbs, and 1 Gbps depending on link utilization. An interesting question is whether upper layers need to be made aware of the switching of rates?

Cable reports bandwidth crunch, considering PON!!!

This is an interesting article at Lightreading reporting cable companies facing a bandwidth crunch. This is not unexpected, since residential broadband bandwidth consumption is increasing rapidly, particularly downloaded video traffic, such as from YouTube. Moreover, the data channels available in DOCSIS 2.0 are limited, DOCSIS 3.0 will still take some time to deploy.

What I found more interesting is the mention of PON under consideration by cable companies. Cable deployments already have fiber to a head end from where a copper ring takes over. Unfortunately the copper ring is shared by a lot of customers, may be even 1000. This is because cable was designed for broadcast, and a lot of customers could feed from the pipe with little attenuation to the signal. However, this architecture is not convenient for data traffic which is not shared between customers. Similarly, upstream traffic performance is pretty poor as the number of upstream channels in DOCSIS 2.0 are very less.

PON will definitely help a long way. I am not sure why PONS have been completely dismissed by cable companies till now. With the competition from satellite television which delivers a much wider range of HDTV channels, and the phone companies BPON architecture, rapid developments in cable may be expected soon.

Teknovus announces partnership with Fiberxon

Teknovus yesterday announced that it would use Fiberxon’s dual-speed transceiver’s in its Turbo EPON (2.5 Gbps) products. The Turb EPON can support the legacy bit rate of 1.25 Gbps as well as the turbo mode of 2.5 Gbps. This is Teknovus’s solution to match the speed of the GPON while the 10 Gig EPON standardization is going on. The press release is available here.

Interview with 100 GigE study group chair

An interview with John D’Ambrosia, the chair of the IEEE 100 GigE study group is here. John articulates the emerging need for 100 GigE and his thoughts on the goals of the standardization activity.

IEEE Meet at Monterey, CA

The IEEE 802.3 interim meeting was at Monterey, CA this last week. It is difficult to summarize activities owing to too much technical detail. The meeting details for each subgroup are available at the IEEE website.

Sun coming up with its own 10 Gig Ethernet chip

Well this news is a surprise to me. Sun is coming up with its own 10 Gig Ethernet chip, which is called Neptune. Apparently, this is the first time that Sun is coming up with its own ASIC interface card. Neptune will be optimized for multithreaded applications and will be designed to work well with multicore chipsets.

Sun has already been working with Neterion and using Neterion’s adapters in its Sun Fire servers, but I guess the performance has not been upto Sun’s standards, which is making Sun come up with its own chipsets. According to this news report Sun believes it can achieve 4 times better performance with its own ASIC for the Niagara chipset. This report also mentions Neptune will intelligently allocate threads to the correct cores on the eight core, 32-threaded Niagara processor and will also head-of-line blocking problems. Neptune will support dual and quad-port Ethernet connections running at 10 or 1Gbit/second in a single PCI Express card.

Sun is also coming up with its next generation processor to Niagara called “Rock” which will be released sometime in 2008. With the standardization efforts of 100 Gig Ethernet, I believe Sun wants to enter the adapter market, which is very important for it to deliver high-performance servers.