Fulcrum is the blue-eyed boy of next-generation Ethernet

30 Nov 2007 | 12:24 GMT

By Nebojsa Novakovic

EVERY PC these days has a Gigabit Ethernet connection - many high-end ones have two in fact. Nvidia chipset-based entries, as well as Intel-based workstations, also have TCP/IP offload to help improve the throughput without taxing the processors.

What about 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE), the next standard for manhandling all those TCP/IP packets over the networks? Well, for now it is stuck in closed-door supercomputing labs of various governments, univesities and alike "institutions of highly guarded secrets", and in a couple of datacentres, here and there.

Why? It is simply too expensive - a quick check with, say, Cisco, Force10 or alike will give you an idea of a cost of the 10GE infrastructure, say NIC card, switch and CX4 standard cabling - close to two kiloquid per port, or a bit cheaper in the US of A, around US$ 2,000 to 3,000.

That IS expensive - but not anymore. Fulcrum, a recent fabless Californian high-end network switch IC outfit - formed by an ex-Caltech gang - seems to have a solution. One that could, in a year or two, bring 10GE closer to the ultra high end PCs and workstations too.

Of course, it still has to start at the current datacenter level, and fill that up first before moving beyond. Fulcrum's FX4000 single-chip 24-port full-bandwidth 10GE Ethernet switch is simple, inexpensive and very fast, at just 200 ns port to port hop speed in Layer 2, or 300 ns in Layer 3. It also does nifty things like preventing DOS (Denial Of Service) attacks and flood control, all in hardware.

The reduced latency is important to supercomputing buffs, where, combined with a fast 10GE adapter like those from Myricom, it can do a message passing write in just about 2 microseconds now, from one system to another. Therefore, it matches the speed of InfiniBand, a wannabe "standard" which for a long time attempted to be a 'jack of all trades' from networking to storage and clustering.

The integration lets you have up to 48 10GE ports in one slim 1.75-inch high switch, but also pack it inexpensively enough even for server or workstation benchmarking labs to have one or two. Example: Quadrics TG201 24-port switch from Bristol, some 80 miles from The Inq office, at just over US$ 7,000 - good for some university cluster play, or Arastra 7100 48-port unit at around US$ 19,000. You can also have autosense 1GE / 10 GE ports with common cabling in the latter case.

Now, the huge bandwidth and low latency could enable some futuristic high end workstation and PC use models too. For instance, a pair of "multimedia servers" with dedicated 10GE connection each, linking to a home network of 1GE connected PCs, all through a single switch, able to stream uncompressed HD or lossless 4K cinema video to all of them, at full guaranteed frame rates without any drops due to the low latency.

On a slightly larger scale, Fulcrum has a big version of this, called "Vegas ", a combination of 10GE and 1GE ports in a single switch, up to 48 ports. You can federate the chips to go up to 144 ports in the near-future products, too.

I'd prefer this to any 802.11n home or office-wide connection, not just because of added speed; you avoid the radiation exposure effects of a zillion access points around you...

Being a small company fed by the venture capital - one of the backers is Andy Bertholsheim, the Sun system guru - Fulcrum has to be concerned with its competitors getting focused on it. For now, they seem to have an advantage over the competitors with this gadget.

However, other makers like Fujitsu and Broadcom will surely follow with fast and more affordable 10GE switch circuitry - how about Intel doing something to get out a fast, affordable 10GE PCI-E adapter for PCs and workstations? µ

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007