Ethernet is the best we can use for our Internet connections, since we do not add additional latency nor do we have instability as it happens with WiFi. Currently, most Smart TVs have a 100M port, while computers find 1000M ports that reach speeds of up to 1 Gbps. Despite this, there are already ports on boards like AMD‘s X570s that come with 2.5G , and you can buy cards that add even 10G ports. However, the crazy new Ethernet standard will allow ports up to 800G .
The group that carries the Ethernet standards has been called the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium for a while, despite the fact that its objective was to create 25, 50 and 100 Gbps Ethernet standards, the latter being the fastest available to date. Now, the group has announced that they are going to create an 800 Gbps standard, and therefore they have also decided to change the name to a more logical one that does not refer to any speed and does not artificially limit them: the Ethernet Technology Consortium.
800G: multiplying the current speed by 8
Among the “promoter” companies of the consortium are Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Google, Mellanox and Microsoft , in addition to more than 40 companies that also offer support for the creation of new and faster standards.
To “celebrate” the name change, the group has unveiled the 1.0 specification of the new 800G standard ( 800GBASE-R , or 800 Gigabit Ethernet ), using 8 106.25 Gbps lines , although the architecture can also support 16 lines. of 53,125G or slower ones. The standard is a derivation of 400GbE from the IEEE 802.3bs group of standards, adding a new Media Access Control (MAC) and a Physical Coding Sublayer (PCS) to achieve these speeds.
The consortium has not disclosed when the first products based on this standard will arrive, but as is normally the case with the new standards, the first devices will be for data centers or servers that pass through huge amounts of data, which can help reduce the energy consumption and the necessary space, helping to offset the high initial cost.
More than 100 GB / s with the new standard
As for the rest of humans, it will probably be years before we see a product that we can buy without going bankrupt. At the moment we have to make do with the fact that most motherboards come with a 2.5G port, thanks to which we can copy files on the network at speeds of up to 312.5 MB / s theoretical, ideal for sending information between various network SSDs or the like. Some very high-end motherboards come with 10G ports for 1.25GB / s speeds, more than enough for local network environments as there are no affordable internet connections for the average citizen to reach that speed.
Even with the 800G you need to have a very powerful server to be able to manage all that traffic, in addition to multiple storage units. We are talking about 100 GB / s , where it is possible to saturate even the speed of RAM that some very typical server configurations reach.
Source> Ethernet Technology Consortium