are they shipping? I checked their website a couple weeks ago
and they were talking 1q08 availability.
You must not have looked thoroughly enough ... ;-) ... and you tend to be
very thorough, but it was after regular business hours. Intel is selling
them directly from there webstore and they offer a couple of other
vendors. That is where I got the pricing.
I think you mean this page
http://shop.intel.com/shop/category.aspx?category_id=171
right? to me, it looks like they're all still listed as
"Out of stock: available January 2008" like this:
http://shop.intel.com/shop/product.aspx?pid=SICC0007&pfid=171&pindex=1
perhaps you found a page of other products? or is their stock warning bogus?
speeds out to100m. A 25m cable is going to run you about $300 (US). Power
similar to Gore's one (which is copper I think).
Mmm ... their website specs them out only to 25m (with asterisk) and that
is a cable with a .9cm diameter! I wonder what the bend radius is on that?
Even their photo of the cable looks like a cobra ... ;-) ... might be OK if
you only need one I guess. Did not see the pricing, but if it is the same
as Intel's fiber why buy the snake? The claimed power draw is lower than I
expected though ... anyone actually tested/used this cable?
my machineroom currently has something like 3.6 tons of quadrics cables,
which are all about 1 cm dia. I don't find that the bend radius is much
of a concern - space certainly is, since getting 38 quadrics out of a rack
is hard enough, not to mention switch racks which have 256 cables.
I believe even the thickest IB is slimmer than quadrics, but yes, I'm hoping
for optical in the next genreation.
though in general, I think the cluster layout is actually more important
than worrying about the cable. for instance, distributing leaf switches
among racks is probably a good idea, and if you do that, you almost
certainly want to use copper for short/local interconnect.
It is a larger system product for now, but as bandwidth demands go up on
smaller systems it won't be the length limitations that kill copper, but
weight, diameter, added power draw, BERs, and equalizing total links costs.
I'm skeptical of the proposition that bandwidth is changing that much -
reeks of the great inet bubble. within a cluster, sure, there are some
apps which do really want more bw. (though the most common bw-user I hear
of is weather codes which seem to do all-to-all purely out of laziness.)
bw out of clusters is probably growing, but at modest rates - have you
priced a full-on 1Gb ISP link, let alone 10Gb?
regards, mark hahn.
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