Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

I'm using the sonnet at work. Work paid for it. Yes it's more expensive. I have gotten over 25 gbps bidirectional, but not by much. Maybe 27. A big downside is that it only supports 15W upstream power which I didn't think to check, so since that laptop only has 2 usb-c ports for power input, it's a bit limiting.

The upside, though, was that I plugged it in, got my throughput, and never had to worry ever again. Remember that engineering time is mucho $$. So troubleshooting overheating, divising a solution, manufacturing it, etc, that all eats into the savings.

The $400 dock would be cool though. It seems smaller than the sonnet and fixes my charging problem. Weirdly I didn't think I'd care about not including transceivers but they did actually come in handy, so that is a downside. Might try to get one of these if I need another one in the future.

Can't you just put a real PCIe NIC in an eGPU enclosure with a fan? I bet you can solve this problem for like $150 and two craigslist transactions.

As mentioned in the blog post's footnote, the bottleneck may just be on the NAS side:

> this real-world speed limitation could also be related to my use of my lower-power Arm NAS (running on Ampere Altra, with 32 fairly-slow CPU cores). I was testing writing to an array of fast enterprise NVMe SSDs, so they shouldn't be the bottleneck here.

He was only getting 1 Gigabyte of throughput out of the built in 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection and moving to the 25 Gigabit connection only made a marginal impact on throughput, after all.

One of the YouTube comments pointed out the issue is most likely the lack of support for SMB Direct (RDMA) in macOS. Would be nice to repeat the test on a Windows/Linux laptop.

How does Jeff Geerling afford so many Mac Studios?

Dang, here I was feeling slick with 10Gb between my MBP and Mac mini and NAS. That’s the thing, it could always be bigger / faster / more. It’s enough for my workflow, but it’s fun to see people push further.

It’s crazy that the Ethernet chips consume more power (presumably - because of the heat) than the processor in the computer. How is driving 25Gb/s such a hot task compared to driving multiple 40Gb/s Thunderbolt ports?

What are typical use cases for needing 25Gbps?

Author talks about 4k video, but AI tells me that for "4K production mastering (ProRes 422 HQ, 4:2:2, 10-bit)" the rate is under 2Gbps.

I'm not saying it's not needed, - just curious.

Somewhat off-topic: has anyone implemented USB C based networking?

So for instance you have two or more machines that have USB 4 ports at 20 to 80 Gbps and you plug in the appropriate USB C cables to connect them.

What do you need to make the connections appear as a (point to point) part of a regular TCP/IP network? Seems much cheaper than Ethernet if you already have the ports.

> I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network,

Nothing against Jeff Geerling and I love his YouTube channel and I'm glad he's one of us HNer but this crop of circular "I make YouTube vids about big tx speeds and big NAS because I make vids hence I need big tx speeds and big NAS so I can speak about big tx speeds and big NAS because I make YouTube vids about big tx speeds and big NAS" videos is a bit tiring IMO.

I'm not into cryptocurrencies but, I don't know, host a full Ethereum node, host a Plex/Jellyfin server serving thousands of movies, host LLMs, etc.

I mean: talk about something else than editing vids because you make vids about vids.