PCIe is a packet switched network with point-to-point routing, firewalls, and link aggregation. Everything is done on dedicated silicon because it simply can't be done in software -- forget having a cache miss, the PCIe bus itself might be the mechanism to serve the cache miss. Or ship a bunch of 400Gbps ethernet traffic... speaking of which, picking a bandwidth fight with PCI express is probably not the best move ever :)
> 16 port, 10 Gb ... 320 Gbps bandwidth in the whole switch
That's a nice switch. Expensive, but nice. Let's do the math on a modern low-end consumer CPU:
PCIe: 20x 32Gb/s x2 = 1280Gbps
Chipset: 8x 16Gb/s x2 = 256Gbps
Display: 4x 4x 12Gb/s = 192Gbps
...and if we compared the switch to a CPU in its own price bracket, this would go from silly to ludicrous.
Look, I'm not asking for a battery of 400GbE ports on every laptop, but USB can deliver 10Gb/s across a few meters for a few dollars while Ethernet wants a few hundred dollars to ship the same bits over the same distance, and that's unfortunate.
People keep trying to make excuses for Ethernet, but I don't think it deserves their efforts. I think something's broken in the consumer networking industry -- it feels like they gave up on consumers entirely after 1GbE, and I think we could all benefit if someone breathed some life back into that corner of the market.
> 16 port, 10 Gb ... 320 Gbps bandwidth in the whole switch
That's a nice switch. Expensive, but nice. Let's do the math on a modern low-end consumer CPU:
PCIe: 20x 32Gb/s x2 = 1280Gbps
Chipset: 8x 16Gb/s x2 = 256Gbps
Display: 4x 4x 12Gb/s = 192Gbps
...and if we compared the switch to a CPU in its own price bracket, this would go from silly to ludicrous.
Look, I'm not asking for a battery of 400GbE ports on every laptop, but USB can deliver 10Gb/s across a few meters for a few dollars while Ethernet wants a few hundred dollars to ship the same bits over the same distance, and that's unfortunate.
People keep trying to make excuses for Ethernet, but I don't think it deserves their efforts. I think something's broken in the consumer networking industry -- it feels like they gave up on consumers entirely after 1GbE, and I think we could all benefit if someone breathed some life back into that corner of the market.