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  • psychobriggsy - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 is simply USB 3.1 Gen 2 rebranded right? The 10Gbps bandwidth version that is old hat by now.

    If this was USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 then there'd be something worth talking about.
  • regsEx - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    Right. CFL already support it.
  • Byte - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    GD it i almost got excited this had USB 3.2 2x2
  • edzieba - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    Bandwidth is the same, but the newer 'gens' update other parts of the USB spec like power delivery and handling of Alt Mode protocols.
  • azfacea - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    gigabit Ethernet in chipset coming in 2020 nice. i guess the shit show is now doubling every 18 months at intel instead of transistors.

    for fucks sake NA is 30% FTTH in 2019. I have 1.5 gigabit fiber internet from bell in toronto for more than a year now. i think residential 10gig fiber will become a thing in this chipsets supposed lifetime and intel is playing hide the PHY with their chipset. nbase-t ethernet was a tiny piece of cmos back when aquentia introduced it 5 years ago (probably at 45nm or 28nm)
  • Dug - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    This is a laptop. 99% will be on wireless. These will come with wifi 6. If you need 10Gb ethernet, you can add it to tb or usb. But then 99% of house holds and businesses don't have 10Gb to each user.
  • azfacea - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    then why have gigabit ethernet ? you either have ethernet or you don't. my problem isnt with the mobile part. my problem is intel shipping garbage from the 90s in 2020 that results in insane situation where wired network is now slower than wireless
  • close - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    @azfacea: "wired network is now slower than wireless"

    Weelll... In theory at least. Keep in mind that WiFi6 for a single device is more or less as fast as WiFi5 (story changes the more devices we have). Strictly talking about speed every real-life-like test out there will show you that WiFi doesn't really go above 1Gbps even in peaks, let alone average. And having ideal conditions for WiFi is far harder than for wired.

    https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/route...
  • CaedenV - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    um... that isn't how networking works?
    When you have an access point, you are still using gigabit ethernet back-haul (with extremely rare exception of some that will do 2.5gbps wired, or 2x1gbps connections).
    WiFi throughput numbers include all of the overhead... so in an environment where you have more than 2-3 devices then go ahead and take your rated wifi throughput and divide that by 2. Then divide the remaining badwidth per active users/devices.
    After all that, then you cram it down a 1gbps pipe back to the switching network, and an internet connection that is going to typically be well under 100mbps. 1gbps wired is still far superior to any wireless simply because it is a dedicated line with minimal ping times. If you are doing anything with assets that are not local to the machine, then wired is still preferred.
    Then there is 10gig Ethernet... which should be a thing, but isn't. And that is not an Intel issue, that is an industry issue. Cisco et all want to keep the 10+gbps at an extreme premium for back-haul technologies. Device manufacturers are afraid to put 10gbps Ethernet on devices because it is hot and power hungry, and does not work well on standardly installed cabling... and the demand for it just doesn't exist. As much as I would love to have 10gig between my desktop and server, it is still just not an option without extra cards, adapters, and better wires. But the industry has decided it is far easier to PCoIP into a VM that has a virtual 10+gig connection to the storage array than it is to do it in the real world with devices spread all over the place.
  • saratoga4 - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link

    There were some leaked Intel ethernet PHYs with 2.5gbit ethernet support. Probably see that whenever Intel gets off of refreshing 14nm chipsets.
  • Kevin G - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    10 Gbit on laptops don't make sense due to the additional power required for 10 Gbit speeds. 2.5 Gbit however does make sense that is simply expanding the symbol domain on the same transmission rate as 1 Gbit Ethernet. As such, the power consumption of a 2.5 Gbit NIC should be the same as a 1 Gbit NIC, all other things being equal.

    What would be helpful is if laptops supported PoE charging. 802.3at supports up to 30W which is enough to slowly charge and use most systems. 802.3bt goes up to 90W which gets a far wider range of systems.
  • edgineer - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    >expanding the symbol domain on the same transmission rate as 1 Gbit Ethernet

    Could you speak more on this?
  • Kevin G - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    1 Gbit Ethernet only leverages 100 of the 255 possible symbols in its encoding scheme. Jumping up to 2.5 Gbit transmission speed can be done 'for free' in most cases as the change is relatively minor on the controller end. It does require a new switch but again the changes are relatively straight forward.

    The real benefit to 2.5 Gbit Ethernet is that it doesn't require new cabling as Cat 5e is supported all the way up to 100 m.
  • close - Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - link

    2.5GBASE-T PHY is a 10G PHY at quarter signaling rate. Better spectral efficiency (6.25bpHz vs. 4bpHz for 1G).
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    Yes, because PoE is SO much more common in homes then 10 gbE is....../rollseyes

    Outside of IP phones and WiFi access points, almost nobody has PoE. Home routers dont support it, there is no demand for it, and hell, most home users dont even use ethernet anymore.
  • Korguz - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    " Home routers dont support it, there is no demand for it, " but you can get PoE capable switches, if one needs PoE support. but that does add extra cost.
  • saratoga4 - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link

    >2.5 Gbit however does make sense that is simply expanding the symbol domain on the same transmission rate as 1 Gbit Ethernet.

    Actually the bigger improvement in bandwidth for 2.5gbaset comes from increasing the symbol rate, not the bits per symbol, although both do increase.

    >As such, the power consumption of a 2.5 Gbit NIC should be the same as a 1 Gbit NIC, all other things being equal.

    Even if the symbol rate were kept constant (it isn't), decoding more bits per symbol requires substantially more power since you need much more complex encoding and error correction.
  • imaheadcase - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    You don't understand what FTTH is. Its not %20, all that means is marketing talk from telcom companies..that can literally mean same speeds as any regular cable person in the USA. Telcoms can run cable all the way to front of the house and market FTTH, but will still only give you packages that they offer online for basic cable speeds.

    Charter offers Fiber internet to almost all its subscribers by the way. Except if i want it its $1500 a month, $500 setup, 2 year contract. lol Just like cable speeds, and prices it varies widely. Business 5 miles away fiber was quoted $800 a month..1000 setup.

    Never trust reports on broadband adoption rates, because they are grossly inflated.
  • azfacea - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    You clearly don't understand whats going on residential fiber in the last few years. I dont care what charter offers you or not. I said 30% of North Americans have access to FTTH now. Bell is literally ripping out twisted pair phone lines and replacing it with FTTH. and no it doesnt cost 1500$.

    internet speeds improvements have been quite high and quite persisitent for 20 years+. gigabit fiber is exteremely common in large cities. and once you put in FTTH there is plenty of room to go for even higher speeds.

    the point was that gigabit ethernet is a ludicrous bottleneck in 2020. its like shipping a laptop with USB 2.0 max.

    wired internet should not be slower than wireless. and if intel wasn't as fucked up as they are the fix is 2 mm worth of 14nm or 10nm silicon.
  • close - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    "the point was that gigabit ethernet is a ludicrous bottleneck in 2020. its like shipping a laptop with USB 2.0 max"

    You sort of have a point... in principle 1Gbps is old. But USB offers tangible speed improvements for anybody with the right devices (a $15 USB stick). Having 1Gbps wired connection, while ancient, limits almost no real person out there. The people who could really use 2.5+Gbps are very, very few and far between. It may look like a lot if you're a techie surrounded by other techies but in reality almost nobody (relative to global customers) has a NAS able to deliver over 1Gbps real speed. Also no self respecting techie would ever assume that WiFi will deliver anything like that.

    On the other hand people do appreciate paying less for the controller, having less heat nd less power consumption. Know your customer.

    https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/nas/b... (even the 10G results are pretty tame)

    "wired internet should not be slower than wireless"

    It's not. Not only is "internet" almost never limited by WiFi or 1Gbps networks these days, no WiFi can consistently reach 1Gbps speeds. Wired doesn't really have these issues.
  • 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.
  • The Von Matrices - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    Most likely something from Realtek or Intel, just like desktop boards, since AMD doesn't make ethernet controllers.
  • DigitalFreak - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    Realtek or Intel.
  • Jorgp2 - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    This is a laptop, most laptops don't even have ethernet ports nowadays.

    And why would you want 10G ethernet, it gobbles up power like nobody's business.

    Unless you want to cram an SFP+ slot to get optical 10G.
  • shompa - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    and if you use a standard AC WiFi router it has a max bandwidth in all channels of about 600-800Mbit. So most users can't even scratch gigabit internet speeds since they use wifi. And I talk real speed, not specs on a brochure.
  • damianrobertjones - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    What's with people using no capitals at the start of sentences? It's madness.
  • shabby - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    we're not in class
  • heavy soil - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    ...says the man with no capitals or spaces for his name
  • DigitalFreak - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    So nothing new on the chipset aside from Wifi6 vs AC.
  • Phynaz - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    Yes, I’m sure this short article has all the chipset details. 🙄
  • DigitalFreak - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    I looked at the spec sheet, jerky.
  • danielfranklin - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    Is the link from the CPU to the PCH doubled in bandwidth? Or am i reading it wrong?
    The bandwidth starved link would be a huge upgrade if they can do that.
    Everything gets attached to the PCH in the consumer desktop and mobile systems and the 4x link is just a joke these days.
    Honestly one of the best things AMD did with their new platform was simply add 4 lanes to the CPU dedicated for a PCI-E SSD, no longer having to share it with every other device in the system.
    Of course this doesnt apply if you arent using a dedicated GPU, but its hard to even find an H series laptop that doesnt give all its PCI-e bandwidth to a GPU im not using (thanks to Optimus and its other amazing laggy mess via the on-die graphics)
  • DanNeely - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link

    I wondered the same as well, but no. OPI x8 has the same bandwidth as DMI x4, and has been used for the last few generations of intels low power combined CPU/southbridge packages. Apparently over a few mm distance 8 lanes of PCIe 2 consumes less power than 4 lanes of PCIe 3.
  • edzieba - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    OPI 3.0 can operate at PCIe 2.0 or 3.0 signalling rates, but usually operates at 2.0 to reduce power consumption. An x8 wide link at 2.0 would match the bandwidth of OPI x4 at 3.0 rates, but consume less power.
  • at8750 - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link

    Ice Lake-U/Y with 495 series chipset(IceLake PCH)
    Comet Lake-U/Y with 400 series chipset(CometLake PCH)

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