Intel’s Comet Lake U&Y 495 Chipset Datasheet: x8 Link, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Support

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• abufrejoval - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link

  A lot of this discussion assumes that all home-traffic is North-South to the Internet.
  
  One of my use cases is a 4TB Steam games cache (and VM network share) that runs on a SSD RAID-0 for the entire family (and home-lab) instead of being replicated locally on each PC. Most of these run Aquantia 10Gbit NICs now, but some lack slots and use 2.5GBit RealTek USB NICs (€40). Those do 300MB/s for copying VMs between the file server and the NVMe equipped Ultrabook.
  
  I should have the 5Gbit USB-C Aquantia QNAP NIC waiting for me when I get back tomorrow, for probably not quite twice that speed but a welcome fewer minutes when you're in a rush to catch a plane.
  
  Actually these days doing Ethernet via USB seems much more attractive than wasting 4 PCIe lanes for only 10Gbit Ethernet: None of the 10Gbit Ethernet chipsets seem to support PCIe 3 let alone PCIe 4 so you're wasting a lot of lanes with standard NICs.
  
  And for that matter: Why can't someone just do a USB based network that looks like proper PCIe switch to all involved, perhaps with an Infiniband uRDMA and Ethernet software overlay say within the confines or your rack or desktop-space?
  
  I need Ethernet only for the longer haul, rack-to-rack or room-to-room, not between machines sitting next to each other.

• imaheadcase - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

  Actually you said %20 of NA have access to FTTH now. Which is wrong even if it was the 20 or the switch to %30 you did. lol
  
  You are the one out of touch with whats going on. FIBER DOES NOT MEAN FIBER TO THE HOME.
  
  Also love how you said "I don't care what charter offers you or not...considering they are one of the biggest internet providers" that don't offer fiber unless you are business and pay what i said before.
  
  Ripping twisted pair phone lines out and replacing it with fiber DOES NOT mean they offer fiber to homes..it simply means they are upgrading fiber around a area. lol

• GreenReaper - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

  That literally *is* what it means in many cases. That's why you see people getting pissy about only having a few hours of backup; because the copper has been taken out (or possibly just disabled), and the fibre connection *to their home* is all they have - they can't rely on the line working 24/7 because of power provided over the copper lines from the phone company.
  
  Yes, 30% is an overestimate (perhaps including FTTH on-demand); many companies have mislabelled FTTC as FTTH; but in some places it's really happening.

• phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link

  You really can't generalise across Canada, the US, and Mexico like that.
  
  Up here in Canada, there's a big push by Telus, Bell, Teksavvy, and a bunch of other telcos to run fibre into everything they can. Mainly because the line-sharing rules from the CRTC don't apply the same way to fibre as they do to twisted pair (there's some updates to that coming or recently introduced). We also have more competition up here between cable (fibre-to-the-node) and traditional telcos (fibre). Even when there's only 2 ISPs to choose from, they tend to actually compete on price, throughput, and service.
  
  The US is almost a 3rd world country when it comes to Internet access. It's crazy hodge-podge of uber-competition in a few metro areas, super-fast service to some areas, and crazy-expensive and slow service in the rest of the country. There's too many counties stuck on <12 Mbps DSL with no other options. And the ISPs like to give erroneous/overly optimistic numbers for how many customers have X Mbps connections to the FCC, so you can't even use their numbers.
  
  Don't know (or care) what Mexico is doing.
  
  There's no way you can possibly say "30% of homes across Canada, the US, and Mexico have FTTH" when it's not even that high in any of the 3 countries individually.

• rahvin - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

  They don't have the PCIe lanes to support a 10G ethernet. Intel chipsets are started for PCIe, this was a deliberate move by Intel. They initially wouldn't support USB 3.1gen2 because it required additional lanes and then M.2 added even more. Just look at the specs, they can only support 16lanes for all the slots.
  
  Once you put a graphics card in you can't add another device. Think about that for a minute. People warned intel 2 years ago that if they didn't expand the number of PCIe lanes on the consumer chips they were going to run into the wall and that wall is this chipset where to support a single NVME and USB 3.1 gen2 they had to limit the slots to a single x16 and 3 SATA ports.

• DanNeely - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

  These are low power chips/chipsets, and only have a cut down south bridge's worth of flexible IO. If you want enough IO to run a GPU well (you could cram one onto an x4, use the a second x4 for a single SSD, and then split the remaining 8 lanes among USB3 and networking, but pointless raid0 is virtually required on gaming laptops today) you need an H series cpu which has 16 PCIe lanes on the CPU in addition to the ones on the chipset. I'm not sure if Intel's release a datasheet for the 4xx chipset for H series laptops, but the 3xx model had 20 lanes to support 3x m.2 along with USB3/networking.

• saratoga4 - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

  >They don't have the PCIe lanes to support a 10G ethernet.
  
  10g ethernet takes 2 lanes. They have that many lanes.

• DigitalFreak - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

  More likely due to power draw. 1000Base-T power draw is around 145mW, whereas 10GBase-T is anywhere from 2-5W.

• close - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

  Not to mention that you need cables and switches for 10G, so a 10G card in a laptop would make anything between 10 and 15 people people happy.

• Phynaz - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

  What Ethernet controller is AMD using in 2020 for laptops? Assuming they can actually get a mobile cpu out the door.