Has anyone heard of a NIC chipset vendor making a chip that can do 2x 10Gb on 1x PCIe Gen5.
Or more likely for flexibility 2x 1/2.5/5/10/25Gb on 1x or 2x Gen4/5?
I feel like I’d want one or two of those embedded on a CPU-attached lane for a AM5 server or workstation build. Unless my math is wrong the data rates should fit and this would save lanes for other high speed add in cards.
Does such a unicorn exist, or is it just going to take a very long time for PCIe 5 to filter in to lower end NIC chip sets?
High bandwidth NICs are generally server tech. And 10G chips are all very old because 25-400Gbit NICs are what servers have nowadays, that’s where PCIe gen 4 and 5 was available and why 10-25Gbit NICs are mostly PCIe 3.0 with 4-8 lanes.
New products or chips for 10Gbit NICs are very unlikely unless consumer boards demand it, in which case they’re on-board.
Get a board with on-board NIC or get a board with more and longer slots. x1 and x2 slots are worthless for anything other than marketing from board vendors (“4x x16 PCIe slots!” (x1 electrical))
We homelabbers plan ahead with board purchase when using consumer boards…good slot (2x x8 slot capability) and lane layout and on-board 10G NIC is the stuff you want to look for.
Id bet Marvel and/or Realtek will make one at some point in the future, but that is probably going to be a few years away until the mass market needs it and nobody will spend the money until then.
Since the spec for copper 10GbE sucks, they may even decide not to make one even when it is needed by the mass market and simply keep everyone on 2.5/5gb and stay there until the market adopts copper 25GbE, which would be a long way off. We are in a kind of weird spot right now where 10gb ports are starting to be desired on wifi7 and future wifi8 APs to satisfy their bandwidth, but PoE+ 10GbE is very expensive due to the very special manufacturing requirements of it (since the 10GbE spec already uses all wire pairs for signals, so you are running up to 15w of power and 48v on each signal pair of wires), meanwhile copper 25GbE is crazy expensive and power hungry to make as well. Many APs are beginning to go alternative routes of SFP+ ports and a copper input port just for PoE+ use, and if this catches on too much there will definitely not be a need for any cheap, low lane use 10gbE chipsets. I have a feeling this is the direction the market will go as 25GbE fiber is far less power hungry and cheaper to make, so we may begin to see a shift even in homes and desktops and the RJ45 days may be numbered (finally) and 2.5/5gb ports that we have today may be where things end up stopping
edit: it appears that just a few days after posting this that Realtek just showed off a 10GbE switch chip designed for sub-$100 4 port switches (its actually an 8 port switch chip, but with the extra costs for hardware per port it is designed for under $100 final price when in a 4 port config). Now, this is a switch chip and not a controller meant for a NIC, but it does show that it appears Realtek at least thinks there is demand for cheaper, newer 10GbE chipsets. This means that we may actually see a 10GbE 1xPCIe Gen5 NIC sooner than I thought, and that not all of the market seems to be betting on the SFP+ route on APs.
Sounds like the don’t exist. At least was not just missing it on Google.
In terms of RJ45 vs. SFP, I kind of ignored that in my question as I assume (?) this would have been more the choice of the board vendor integrating said controller choosing what PHY to enable on any given board variant. But, yes, I agree SFP+/SFP28 would be option to get if you can.
AQC-113 chipset i believe supports 1x PCIe 4.0. However i don’t believe any cards exist yet. OWC makes a single port 2x card. But it will work at 1x if you have a notched PCIe 4.0 1x slot. A 1x AQC-107 5Gb card exists.
PCI Express 4.0 x2 (using a PCIe 2.0/3.0 slot) or x1 (using a PCIe 4.0 slot)
The AQC series are “troublesome” in general though but the Asus ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI has one and also Asus ProArt X870E-CREATOR WIFI. The X670E board is quite common among users here on the forums including myself.
I have an OWC dual 19gb nic (aquantia chipset) which runs on pcie4x1. Intel also do an x700 series which IIRC is similar. Used intel is much cheaper than OWC new. Aq does nit work under BSD…
Just looked again at the BSD hardware list and the AQC is not on there. Regarding the comment “troublesome on general” I don’t disagree - AQC113CS on TrueNAS works a charm, and NixOS used to work until about a year ago and now is forever failing. So definately YMMV!
