New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

All these USB version names. I used to know what they all meant, but then the USB IF went ahead and renamed them all and made a bunch of versions have the same name and renamed some versions to have the same name as the old name of other versions.

I have absolutely no idea what anyone means when they say USB 3.2 gen 2x2. I used to know what USB 3.2 meant but it's certainly not that.

A Framework expansion card was also announced this week. https://frame.work/nl/en/products/wisdpi-10g-ethernet-expans...

Are there any that actually have a SFP+ port? That's all I want. No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7, and you can just change it up to a $7 multimode when you need longer runs.

10 GbE sits in a really weird spot for me, maybe I'm just not understanding something though. It's at most 1.25 GB/sec of bandwidth, yet it's relatively quite expensive. It's not sufficient bandwidth for getting good performance out of most SSDs, yet it's really excessive for any hard drives (except for RAID10 setups I guess). For SSDs you want thunderbolt (or 40+ GbE) connection for best latency and performance, and for hard drives 2.5Gbit/sec is more than enough. As I said, I might be misunderstanding something, but 10 GbE sits between the two sensible options for me.

Is it also possible to power a laptop through those adapters? PoE++ can deliver up to 100W of power, more than enough for most laptops.

FWIW I got a Xikestor 10G adapter with the Realtek chipset from AliExpress and it underperforms my much cheaper 5G one.

I have a 5G USB and getting it to work at 5G speeds in Linux was a challenge. The driver worked properly only with kernel 6.12 not 6.10 nor 6.14

TFA doesn't compare the performance of the new adapters with the older ones.

Does anyone know if the old bulky ones will hit 10G speeds on the same hardware?

I assume I can get a few old TB2 models and adapters on the cheap and they'll run cool enough and stable enough for constant 1G internet and occasional 10G intranet

My favorite USB ethernet adapter is a lowly 100 MBit one that works everywhere without requiring driver downloads.

I don't understand how a 10GbE adapter is possible without Thunderbolt, or why not being Thunderbolt makes it smaller. In my experience USB speeds faster than 3 don't happen in practice unless you have a Thunderbolt port and device. Maybe I just don't have devices that use the faster USB speeds, but Thunderbolt has always been the one and only way to exceed the speed of USB for me.

I think USB 4 exists based on the Thunderbolt spec (or the other way around?), but doesn't require any Thunderbolt capabilities and therefore isn't very telling.

I think Apple's approach of supporting Thunderbolt 4/5 on every USB port of the MacBook Pro is the only sustainable way forward.

For Thunderbolt 4/5 docks, I've held off from buying a high-end Thunderbolt 5 dock as many still have 2.5GbE Ethernet and other limitations with displays. The CalDigit TS5 Plus is one of the only options with 10GbE and its $500 (and usually OoS). I managed to buy an ex-corporate refurb HP Thunderbolt 4 G4 dock for only ~$64 and would recommend others do the same (this has an Intel 2.5GbE and good display outputs)

What cat cable works with it?

Can any of them do TSN?

wow. Maybe i should try it

The PCIe version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423967

It seems like a lot of laptop manufacturers skipped the USB 3.2 Gen2x2 in favor of USB4/TB4.

By the way, how are switches and cables for > 1Gbps these days?

From the source of the RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver in FreeBSD: (old, not directly relevant, just amusing) https://elixir.bootlin.com/freebsd/v10.2/source/sys/pci/if_r...

/* * RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver * * Supports several extremely cheap PCI 10/100 adapters based on * the RealTek chipset. Datasheets can be obtained from * www.realtek.com.tw. * * Written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu> * Electrical Engineering Department * Columbia University, New York City / / * The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is * probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible * exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master * DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance * gains that bus-master DMA usually offers. * * For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor * registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned * on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to * do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely * case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet * is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only * four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four * packets queued for transmission at any one time. * * Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large * buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received * frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets * will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer * area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol * levels. * * It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent * performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or * some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it. * * On the bright side, the 8139 does have a built-in PHY, although * rather than using an MDIO serial interface like most other NICs, the * PHY registers are directly accessible through the 8139's register * space. The 8139 supports autonegotiation, as well as a 64-bit multicast * filter. * * The 8129 chip is an older version of the 8139 that uses an external PHY * chip. The 8129 has a serial MDIO interface for accessing the MII where * the 8139 lets you directly access the on-board PHY registers. We need * to select which interface to use depending on the chip type. */

I've had such terrible success with usb-ethernet adapters on linux, to the point where wifi is usually much more performant. The main issue is connection drops. You can see it easily in gnome where the ethernet connection constantly drops and comes back up. It's so frequent though that even scp-ing a medium-sized file is likely to fail or stall. Hardware is a Framework 13 3rd gen laptop.

Is this just my hardware? It's hard to imagine these issues would be so prevalent with how many people use these on linux...

I have a RTL8157 5 Gbps adapter from CableMatters.

Interestingly it seems to get burning hot on the MacBook M1 Pro while it remains cool on the M5 Pro model.

Maybe the workload is different, but I would not rule out some sort of hardware or driver difference. I only use a 1G port on my router at the moment.

> USB 3.2 Gen 2x1

What the fuck

[dead]

Will they be cheaper? I look at the RAM prices. Granted, RAM is in a different category than USB adapters, but I no longer trust anyone writing "will be cheaper" - the reality may be different to the projection made.

Too bad this is 10Gbase-T, that energy-wasting hot-running garbage needs to die sooner rather than later. Good thing the ranges for 25Gbase-T are short enough to make it impractical for home use.

(Fibre is nowhere near as "sensitive" as some people believe.)

Can these support local LLM’s?