Is this the year 100GE NICs go mainstream? If you're into AI, it might be

The growing popularity of generative AI and availability of smart features in virtualization platforms like VMware's vSphere will help to drive faster networking into enterprise servers in 2023. Dell'Oro Group analyst Barron Fung predicts that by the end of 2023, 100Gbps-or-faster Ethernet NICs will be responsible for nearly …

[Anonymous Coward]

System costs benefits

while NICs are getting more expensive, the cost per bit tends to be lower on these cards. This means if the server can take advantage of the higher speeds, it may actually end up being cheaper than using multiple slower, less expensive NICs.

Blade and rack mount servers are often highly slot limited so getting more out of fewer slots allows for higher densities. Lets face it no one wants to put boxes like HP's old Super Domes with 192 PCI slots into their data centres these day.

You can always use SR-IOV to get lots of functions.

[Anonymous Coward]

100GE Nics? This is getting a bit silly now. There is only so much much pron I can download or view in 3 minutes. Where will this madness end?

[Anonymous Coward]

But think of the millions of others who share your kink and want to watch the same porno as you. Then the video of my kink might be on the same box and we'll need to share bandwidth, them's servers gonna need a lot of bandwidth.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Definition of Mainstream...

25 GBit networking is not yet mainstream for servers. Since for most of them there is not even a need for more than 500 MBytes per second besides testing and benchmarks 10 GBit is still enough for quite a while. Other things, like getting the delays down with sfp-twinax-direct-cabeling instead of optical or normal copper, are more relevant.

"Those into AI", as the article says, are simply not mainstream. And that is the reason why there is still such revenue.

But then I look into Intel nics and see: 10 GBit is not yet mainstream for Intel as well due to the huuuge amount of bugs and weirdness I see with nics from that vendor. They've been selling them for about two decades now, and still bad.

[Roland6]

Re: Definition of Mainstream...

I presume the driver is to have the full data centre network fabric operating at the same speed to avoid in network buffering and associated latency.