10 gigabit Ethernet - Add on question

[Kuba Ober]

On Monday 31 December 2007, Robert D. Holtz - Lists wrote:
> How do you topple the memory bus/cup/peripheral bus restraints to even push
> past ~2gbps per host, in a practical host environment?

1gbps is AFAIK less than 100 megabytes/s if you factor in overheads.

So 10 gbps is say 800 megabytes/s, practically, at a high link utilization. It 
should be relatively easy to achieve that on modern hardware. The memory 
bandwidths are a few times beyond that, same goes for DMA bandwidths. With 
current PCI Express-supporting chipsets, if you do memory-to-network 
transfers (just for benchmarking), the other bus devices won't even notice, 
and all the CPU will see is less leftover memory bandwidth.

One DDR2 PC-3200 memory stick will happily transfer way more than 1GB/s to 4 
PCIe lanes, on relatively standard hardware. I tried.

Cheers, Kuba