Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE network adapter is coming to motherboards later this year

Can we finally get some affordable 10GbE switches too?

It's impressive that they got the power consumption down to less than 2 watts. I think this is the first 10GBASE-T NIC I've seen that doesn't have a heatsink on it.

Great to (maybe) see 10GbE coming and the initial price sounds reasonable compared to currently avaipable 2.5G and 5G Realtek adapters.

Apparently Linux 6.16 will have the driver included.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Realtek-RTL8127A

Realtek itself has demonstrated its RTL8127 NIC working with an unknown switch using cheap CAT5E cables, and the company’s representatives at the booth emphasised this fact. However, we do not know which switch or router the company used. Yet, most 10GbE routers and switches are designed for CAT6 cabling.

Funny update about the cabling they used during the demo. There's really no reason Cat 5e couldn't work for short enough distances with little interference. It's more about the guaranteed minimum distance you can get, 55m with Cat 6 and the full 100m for any rating beyond that.

About damn time. We got a boost every few years from 10 to 100 to 1000. Then we just... Stopped. Stagnated. It's understandable why, for a good long time one gigabit was all anybody needed, 100 MByte/sec is pretty good even for a NAS.

Of course then fiber ISPs got in the game, now in a lot of places you can buy 7-8gbps as a consumer product. And even multi-gig, which was supposed to 'fix' this, really ended up being insufficient. You could make a salad argument that multi gig was a waste of time and we should have just started moving to 10 gig.

Unfortunately, 10 gig switches still carry a significant premium. But this will start to shake that up. Sooner the better.

Wasn't it Realtek who made 1GbE popular as well by making the cheap 8111 IC over two decades ago?

Realtek are monsters of semiconductor creation.

Destroyed

• sound card industry
• network card industry

What's next?

This is going to be a huge help for home video editors.

but home Internet is still stuck at Gigabit speeds.... and only in some cases are they maybe letting you go to 2 Gb. Wasn't there that post floating around lemmy a while ago about how China can potentially give everyone like 5Gb for home or something? Can't find it now but swore it was here....

Serious question: What do you use a 10GbE adapter for? Are there ISPs which offer 10gigabit bandwidth? I suppose it would be useful on a LAN

edit:

I am just wondering if it would be better to go straight to fiber instead of ethernet as most have fiber to the home anyway. That should help with future speed upgrades beyond 10Gbit as well.

Fiber is also more power efficient? Why not?

To make use of a 10Gb network, wouldn't I also need all of my equipment in between things to support 10Gb? Where am I supposed to get a 10Gb modem for residential use?

Realtek, don’t they have issues with drivers in FreeBSD? Or am I horribly out of date.

In any case I’m excited, even if i barely tap into 1gbe capability most of the time.

as if more than .005% of computer users will actually be able to see any difference whatsoever.