In various parts of the world, although in very select places at the moment, 10 gig Fiber is beginning to take shape and with it the rules for connecting our PC to the network of networks will change. Not only will they allow us to view content at a higher quality, thanks to the greater volume of data that can be transmitted, but they will also require major changes to our PCs. So it is very likely that your computer is not ready for the new era of telecommunications.
If you look at the motherboard of your computer you will see that the connectivity of the network card, if you are lucky, is 2.5 Gbps. That if you’re lucky. Since most boards get a gigabit. Many of you will be tempted to buy a more powerful network card, but those that support this speed are extremely expensive at the moment and if you have a laptop, you will find that you cannot do it. Will I have to change my computer for the 10 gig Fiber? Is it true that hard drives could disappear once the internet is faster?
Is my PC ready for 10 gig fiber?
The Internet has evolved a lot since its birth in the 90s, especially in terms of what we can see on the screen, and everything has come hand in hand with the evolution of our computer’s components, which are increasingly powerful, and networks. From the modem we went to broadband with ADSL and from there to fiber optics. The consequences?
Network connectivity increasing several orders of magnitude until reaching our days where we can do things like play video games in the cloud, watch movies on demand and even make our own broadcasts. Under all these premises it seems that the Internet multi-gigabit is not going to change many things.
However, with 10 gigabyte Fiber we find that certain speed figures are even higher than those seen in certain peripherals, as is the case with the most used storage units in a PC for several decades. However, it is time to bust some myths.
Hard Drive vs. 10 Gig Fiber
No, we have not gone crazy, we must start from the fact that, in terms of bandwidth, a future 10 gig Fiber connection will have a much higher total bandwidth than the SATA port of the hard drives and SSD not M.2, which is 6 gigs per second. However, the crucial performance issue is data latency. Normally, our processor finds them most of the time in RAM, but there are times when it is necessary to dump them from the storage unit.
And here we enter into a paradox, we normally measure latency times in nanoseconds, which is one billionth of the time it takes to say a word. At such scales our perception of time becomes marginal. But, if a processor took a second to perform an operation, then the thing would be as follows for the rest of the memory accesses.
| Operation | Weather |
|---|---|
| cpu cycle | 1 second |
| L1 cache | 3 seconds |
| L2 cache | 9 seconds |
| RAM | several minutes |
| ssd | Several days |
| HDD | 1 month |
Is the internet going to get faster than a hard drive?
Well, the answer is that it will depend on how far away the data is. It is not the same if you live in Spain to access a remote storage system in Madrid or Barcelona, than if it is in Moscow, where the latency will be much higher and, therefore, the performance will be lower. So don’t expect to be able to run your applications using a remote drive somewhere on an internet server.
Apart from that it would be counterproductive, since not only us, but there would be dozens or even hundreds of users accessing said unit. So the program information would have to be multiplied several times. In other words, it is not worth it in terms of infrastructure costs and therefore it is important to take into account the difference between latency and bandwidth.
Will we need a more powerful processor?
Greater bandwidth means a greater amount of information and with it the network packets that the processor or network card on our motherboard has to manage increase. If these are not dealt with quickly enough, it happens like when a car stalls in the middle of a busy road. A containment is created and everything that comes after slows down. To many it may seem that, with our CPU capable of managing RAM bandwidths of tens of GB per second, that a few Gbits should not saturate our processor.
However, low-speed peripheral management is often handled by the chipset in a conventional PC or by a low-performance part in a laptop. And we must start from the fact that managing the sending and receiving of data in a network requires an additional level of complexity. However, your PC is prepared for 10 gig Fiber. Let’s not forget that USB ports with speeds of several tens of gigabits per second already exist today. What will we see in the future? Simple, network card integrated into the processor peripheral management and on-board conversion from Ethernet to USB.
And what will happen to current PCs?
Don’t worry about it, even if your PC doesn’t have a fast enough network card, you can give it a use by connecting one of the USB C to Ethernet adapters adapted for it once they appear in stores. So don’t worry, your PC is ready for the internet of the future, you won’t have to buy a new one to enjoy the wonders of a faster network of networks.
