Week 3 Posting - BSIT220 - Terabit Ethernet

 While doing research for this week's paper on the evolution of Ethernet technology. I came across a few articles talking about the future of Ethernet and that was the Terabit Ethernet. TbE is Ethernet with speeds above 100 Gigabit Ethernet. In 2016 after the standards for IEEE P802.3bs were set, which was 400 Gigabit Ethernet, many suppliers began working towards faster Ethernet. According to the Wikipedia page, the Ethernet Alliance's 2022 technology roadmap expects speeds of 800 Gbps and even 1.6 Tbps to become an IEEE standard between 2023 and 2025.

Companies are having to prepare for this upcoming technology by upgrading their CPUs and Motherboards to be compatible with PCI express 4.0 and 5.0. Intel has recently implemented PCIe 5.0 on their newest 12th Generation platforms. The more capable PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 will help enable these higher speeds with TbE and lower the times for data transfers.

I don't fully understand everything I read in the article when it began talking about how the quicker speed of memory access because of something called "Remote Direct Memory Access which allows Smart NICs to access memory directly from another system without going through the traditional TCP method and without any CPU intervention." I'm assuming based on what I read that faster data speeds can help corporations to deal with fewer steps when it comes to large amounts of shared storage. It's interesting to see how far technology has advanced with Ethernet and how after all this time it's still the same technology just with improvements. I'd be interested to know the scenarios when you would need to send that amount of data somewhere, but I'm sure there are reasons out there.

https://www.techradar.com/news/paving-the-way-for-terabit-ethernet