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  • Before Jeff first talk about this, I got one of those cheap Ethernet adapters (with the new realtek chip) on aliexpress for ~55€. It works really well, but I don't have USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 hardware, so I only get ~4Gbps out of it. But I'm pretty happy to break the 1G barrier, and the adapter will be useful in the future when I get better hardware; and I don't have to go through a 2.5Gbps or 5Gbps step.
    by Aissen
  • Unlike "5 Gb/s" USB, which in reality is 4 Gb/s USB, so a 5 Gb/s Ethernet interface cannot reach its maximum speed on a 5 Gb/s USB, the "10 Gb/s" USB is really 10 Gb/s, i.e. the difference between its real speed and 10 Gb/s is small enough to be negligible.

    The same is true for 10 Gb/s Ethernet, whose speed is not exactly 10 Gb/s, but the difference from 10 Gb/s is also negligible.

    Therefore, you do not need a 20 Gb/s USB to reach the maximum speed with a 10 Gb/s Ethernet interface, a 10 Gb/s USB port is good enough.

    The overhead of data framing on USB is slightly higher than on Ethernet, so the maximum throughput on an USB 10 Gb/s Ethernet interface is a little lower than for a PCIe Ethernet NIC, but the difference is small enough to not matter. Usually other factors, like bad device drivers or inefficient programs, can cause much greater variations in Ethernet throughput.

    The 9.4 Gb/s throughput obtained in TFA is perfectly reasonable when taking into account the packet overheads, which make impossible to reach 10 Gb/s for user data, regardless of hardware. A 20 Gb/s USB interface could not provide any serious improvement over that.

    by adrian_b
  • I think most people do not have 10g UTP infrastructure they want to exploit, but many people do have 2 computers they'd like to connect together at high speed, and these people are far better served by just connecting those computers' Thunderbolt ports together. With nothing other than an admittedly pricey cable, you get 10, 20, or 40gbps links depending on the endpoints. That's the "something faster" that will work well for most people.
    by jeffbee
  • Only getting 95% of the book rated speed? I'm OK, that's still a shitload-and-a-half of speed.
    by ggm
  • Every PCIe 10G ethernet card I've seen has a heatsink on it, sometimes covering the entire card or even have little fans on the heatsink.

    Expecting it to work full time in a laptop is a bit of a stretch of the heat dissipation budget.

    Also, the laptop he is working has the AMD FP8 chipset - depending on how the ports are setup, he might only get 10G USB, if the ports are allocated to video instead.

    by RachelF
  • I chuckled at 10G wired ethernet on a laptop. I mean in a docking station? Sure that seems reasonable. But fun none the less.

    I appreciate the USB-C nature of the Framework's expansion ports, it does make real the entire reason that USB was created in the first place, hot plug slots. Still, I (and others) pointed out to Intel early on that using Ethernet with a specific packet type would be cheaper and just as fast (which the ATA over Ethernet folks proved), but then you wouldn't get the 'certification tax' that the USB consortium extracts. :-).

    Cynicism aside, the design issues suggest that it might make sense in future laptops to have heat spreaders around the plug in port, although that makes things thicker and people obsess over thinness.

    by ChuckMcM
  • Point of clarification since it isn’t clear from the title. This isn’t a Framework product, but a product by Wisdpi designed for the Framework Expansion Card form factor.
    by nrp
  • Well, this is about USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which is a mess created by USB IF for good old, blue USB A connectors. Not USB-C complexity.

    USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 is the very rarely supported 20Gb/s variant of USB 3, and making devices now that require that for full performance is a weird decision, with high-speed capable ports generally having wider support for either USB4 or Thunderbolt3+. I imagine the reason would be that some chip with an otherwise poor market fit got cheap...

    Throwing this into the mix definitely doesn't improve the USB-C "what does this port support" conundrum, but this specific one predates USB-C and is not at all something you'd normally hit.

    by arghwhat

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