No reason to use fiber on short runs like that. DAC cables are cheap and better in pretty much every way over short distances. You're probably thinking of RJ-45 NICs and SFP modules which are known to run pretty hot.
reply+1 fiber over short distance just adds power/heat and latency compared to DAC - fiber is nice for ease of cabling and airflow, but not performance or cost when below a few meters.
replyThe 512GB Mac Studio is going for around 30K used.
replyI ran Ms-01s with 100GBE, copper DACs in my kubernetes cluster. Killed the NVME drives in that tiny box. I'd bet the same issue doing this with FW. And I wasn't even pushing 100GBE very hard at all, it was mostly for fun.
replyAI + 100GBE (under load) + tiny box = unreliable and eead very quickly.
How many MS-01s did you have clustered?
replyAnd could you not use something like an N5 + iSCSI for storage?
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replyHe did cover the Tb/USB4 ;)
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Looks like there is currently no RDMA support for thunderbolt, so it's a much higher latency connection. Apple has RDMA over thunderbolt working, so I wonder if it's possible on Strix Halo.
replyWhat is simplex ethernet?
replyImagine two computers A and B. A has two NICs, A1 and A2. B has B1 and B2. So 4 NICs total. You connect directly A1 to B1 and A2 to B2 with crossover cables. You then route all the traffic from A to B over A1 to B1 and all the traffic from B to A over B2 to A2.
replyWhy do you do all this? To avoid collisions and the loss of effective bandwidth from back-offs.
It only really works with 2 computers because if you add a 3rd, now you need 12 NICs instead of 4 for unidirectional point-to-point connections.
That's not how modern ethernet works at all. A single NIC talking directly to an another one has no collisions ever. Depending on what your channel is, either you have separate wires for the directions, or you are using a hybrid circuit (as in telegraphs, the term is so overloaded it's hard to google). Either way, packets going in one direction never wait for packets going in the other.
replyBut why would you? You don't have collisions since the introduction of full duplex ethernet on both copper/fiber. Kinda sounds like you're confusing half duplex with simplex, or maybe bidi? As a network engineer I've never seen someone ever refer to "simplex ethernet".
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