Realtek to Bring Affordable 10 Gbps Ethernet to the Masses Later This Year

[TheLostSwede]

It's been two years since Realtek showed off its 5 Gbps Ethernet chips at Computex and at the time, they hinted at a 10 Gbps chip. This year, the company was showing off a wide range of 10 Gbps Ethernet chips on the show, ranging from a standard consumer solution, to server chips and native USB variants. The base chip is the RTL8127, which offers the full range of speeds from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with a sub 2 Watt power consumption. This is followed by the RTL8127AP intended for servers, as it has full remote management support via DASH 1.2 support. Both chips sport a PCIe 4.0 x1 host interface, which for better or worse limits compatibility to more modern systems.

Next up is the fibre only RTL8127ATF, although it doesn't support 10/100 Mbps speeds, but it has a lower power consumption at just over 1 Watt. This is followed by the RTL8127AT, which is limited to the same speeds as the fibre only SKU, but it's a standard copper NIC. What sets these two SKUs apart from the previous two, is that they support PCIe Gen 3 x2 or PCIe Gen 4 x1 and they actually have a physical PCIe x2 interface, which limits compatibility with some motherboards as an add-card. Finally we have the RTL8159, which is Realtek's USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 10 Gbps chip, which again covers the full range of speed from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps. Realtek had several mockups of customer products on display, but final products might not look exactly like the ones shown.




In addition to the Ethernet controllers, Realtek also had a 10 Gbps Ethernet PHY on display, which should make its way into some more affordable and consumer friendly 10 Gbps switches, as this has been a missing link when it comes to making more affordable 10 Gbps switches. It might also end up in some future routers and cable modems, since it's likely to be cheaper than any competing solutions out there today. The PHY will also find its way into SFP+ to RJ45 copper adapters of various types, with a couple of examples below.



Although we weren't given any pricing, the person we talked to hinted at it being less than double the price of Realtek's current 5 Gbps chips, which again are less than double the price of its 2.5 Gbps chips. As far as final consumer pricing goes, it's very likely that we'll see 10 Gbps network cards for less than US$50, maybe even less. We were also informed that there will be several motherboards launching later this year with the RTL8127 and we should see network cards arrive sometime in Q4 this year in retail.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[outlw6669]

I think I can speak for everyone when I say About Damn Time!

Under 2W for full 10 Gbps sounds excellent, and I can not wait for these to filter through to retail

 

[Chaitanya]

Finally, we went from 10Mbps to 100Mbps to 1Gbps in quick succession but 10Gbps has been a rarity in consumer space for over a decade.

 

[Prima.Vera]

The only affordable Internet is the one provided by the Internet Service Providers.

Finally, we went from 10Mbps to 100Mbps to 1Gbps in quick succession but 10Gbps has been a rarity in consumer space for over a decade.

Whom do you think is responsible for that?

 

[londiste]

Finally, we went from 10Mbps to 100Mbps to 1Gbps in quick succession but 10Gbps has been a rarity in consumer space for over a decade.

For a bit of Ethernet history. Talking mostly about consumer/SMB sector here - ISPs and enterprise tend to go for the latest and greatest and cost is not such a blocker for them.

Ethernet was the start of real standardization and the progress did/does take time.
10BASE5 and 10BASE2 lasted from (in case of 10BASE2 late) 80s to early to mid 90s.
10BASE-T was standardized in 1990 but really gained popularity from mid to late 90s.
100BASE-T/TX was standardized in 1995 and started to take over in late 90s.
1000BASE-T was standardized in 1999 but really gained traction in late 2000s.
10GBASE-T was standardized in 2006 but is still working its way up.

There are multiple reasons for that, both technical and non-technical.
- Initially the cabling was also a problem but that got solved quite fast.
- NICs and especially switches became the real problem. Necessary throughput for 10Gbit seemed to take even manufacturers by surprise and from the looks of how both NIC and PHY chips have progressed the manufacturing processes really needed to evolve for even remotely affordable 10Gbit switches to become a thing. Problem was not just the size and cost of the ASICs but to a large degree also the power consumption and resulting heat emission.
- Then there is the question of whether a consumer or normal office even needs the speeds on offer.

To try and alleviate the problems, 2016 brought 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T. First of these seems to have been a limited success, latter has been on the other side of the too difficult-expensive switchover, so it has been largely neglected in favor of going for 10GBit.

Faster standards have been there for a while but the huge cost and lack of real need has prevented these from being a thing in consumer space. Copper-based 25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T have been there since 2016 - almost a decade. Not even mentioning the fiber stuff where 40 Gbit and 100 Gbit ahve been standardized since 2010.

Whom do you think is responsible for that?

Physics, mostly

 

[TheLostSwede]

I think I can speak for everyone when I say About Damn Time!

Under 2W for full 10 Gbps sounds excellent, and I can not wait for these to filter through to retail

The wattage varies a bit between the chips, but all are below 2 Watts, so a heatsink is apparently needed, but only a small one.

Also, keep in mind that the US$50 price is my expectation, but it might be much lower than that, as 5 Gbps network cards are already sub US$30, which is ~US$15 more than the cheapest 2.5 Gbps cards. I think it might drop to US$40 fairly quickly after launch.

Whom do you think is responsible for that?

No need for conspiracy theories, it really hasn't been feasible to make something like this until these past couple of years.

 

[Tigerfox]

Copper-based 25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T have been there since 2016 - almost a decade.

Only on paper. I know of exactly one 25GBase-T Switch from ALPHA that was officially presented, but AFAIK never became available. Apart from that, there has been zero 25/40GBase-T hardware for almost nine years. Because of that it is essentially dead and Cat.8-cabling is a scam.

 

[bonehead123]

For a bit of Ethernet history. Talking mostly about consumer/SMB sector here - ISPs and enterprise tend to go for the latest and greatest and cost is not such a blocker for them.

Ethernet was the start of real standardization and the progress did/does take time.
10BASE5 and 10BASE2 lasted from (in case of 10BASE2 late) 80s to early to mid 90s.
10BASE-T was standardized in 1990 but really gained popularity from mid to late 90s.
100BASE-T/TX was standardized in 1995 and started to take over in late 90s.
1000BASE-T was standardized in 1999 but really gained traction in late 2000s.
10GBASE-T was standardized in 2006 but is still working its way up.

There are multiple reasons for that, both technical and non-technical.
- Initially the cabling was also a problem but that got solved quite fast.
- NICs and especially switches became the real problem. Necessary throughput for 10Gbit seemed to take even manufacturers by surprise and from the looks of how both NIC and PHY chips have progressed the manufacturing processes really needed to evolve for even remotely affordable 10Gbit switches to become a thing. Problem was not just the size and cost of the ASICs but to a large degree also the power consumption and resulting heat emission.
- Then there is the question of whether a consumer or normal office even needs the speeds on offer.

To try and alleviate the problems, 2016 brought 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T. First of these seems to have been a limited success, latter has been on the other side of the too difficult-expensive switchover, so it has been largely neglected in favor of going for 10GBit.

Faster standards have been there for a while but the huge cost and lack of real need has prevented these from being a thing in consumer space. Copper-based 25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T have been there since 2016 - almost a decade. Not even mentioning the fiber stuff where 40 Gbit and 100 Gbit ahve been standardized since 2010.


Physics, mostly

Although all your points are valid ones, the simple fact remains that for the average joe/SOHO user, these types of cards are essentially useless until the money-grubbin ISP's loosen their iron-clad grip on bandwidth (and slow-assed modems) and give us the speeds that can utilize what these cards offer.....

Yea they would be nice for an internal network but just sayin

 

[outlw6669]

Also, keep in mind that the US$50 price is my expectation, but it might be much lower than that, as 5 Gbps network cards are already sub US$30, which is ~US$15 more than the cheapest 2.5 Gbps cards. I think it might drop to US$40 fairly quickly after launch.

To be honest, I am more interested in 10Gbit switches becoming more affordable.

If you get a bit savvy on eBay, you can already snag old Intel X540-T1 cards for 20~30€.
Though not officially supported in Windows 11, the Windows 10 drivers still work just fine, only requiring you to manually install them.
Both my home server and my main rig have had a pair of these running without any issues for a few years now.

The biggest roadblock to larger adaption, in my eyes at least, is the price of switches.
Even today, the least expensive 10Gbit switch I can find, with only two 10Gbit ports, is still over 100€, with four ports costing a minimum of 200€.
Compared to an eight port 2.5Gbit switch, which can be had for around 55€, or standard 1Gbit switches which cost basically nothing, getting your house connected gets expensive fast.
My hope is that these new chips will push the price 10Gbit switches way down.

Once they start getting put into standard home routers, or those modem/router combo boxes that ISPs give out, then we will really be getting somewhere!

 

[TheLostSwede]

To be honest, I am more interested in 10Gbit switches becoming more affordable.

Well, that's where the new PHY's come into play, as there's already sub US$100 10 Gbps switch ICs from Realtek, but the PHY's have been too costly, which is why the switch itself has been quite pricey per port.
In fact, I believe it's almost a decade since Realtek announced the RTL9303, which back then was announced as sub US$100, so it should be a lot less than that by now.

If you get a bit savvy on eBay, you can already snag old Intel X540-T1 cards for 20~30€.
Though not officially supported in Windows 11, the Windows 10 drivers still work just fine, only requiring you to manually install them.
Both my home server and my main rig have had a pair of these running without any issues for a few years now.

But those are PCIe 2.1 x8 cards that draws almost 11 Watts. That's not really comparable to this.

The biggest roadblock to larger adaption, in my eyes at least, is the price of switches.
Even today, the least expensive 10Gbit switch I can find, with only two 10Gbit ports, is still over 100€, with four ports costing a minimum of 200€.
Compared to an eight port 2.5Gbit switch, which can be had for around 55€, or standard 1Gbit switches which cost basically nothing, getting your house connected gets expensive fast.
My hope is that these new chips will push the price 10Gbit switches way down.

See above. There are some €200 five port 10 Gbps switches, but yeah, only a couple, like the Trendnet TEG-S750 and the TP-Link TL-SX105, although I understand that this is still more than what you want to pay and I think we should see at least sub €150 10 Gbps switches to start with, but it'll take a year or two until we reach sub €100.

Once they start getting put into standard home routers, or those modem/router combo boxes that ISPs give out, then we will really be getting somewhere!

It's unlikely that we'll see more than two 10 Gbps ports in routers, at least for now and mainly only on higher-end devices.

I will add that even Realtek thinks 5 Gbps won't really be a thing, since the cost difference between their own chips are simply too small for 5 Gbps Ethernet to make sense and no-one makes a 5 Gbps switching IC.
MaxLinear said 5 Gbps is a no go as well, but they're looking into doing something a bit more consumer friendly on the 10 Gbps front, but we're most likely a couple of years away from an announcement from them.
The only advantage 5 Gbps Ethernet has is that it can operate over Cat 5e.

 

[Tigerfox]

The only advantage 5 Gbps Ethernet has is that it can operate over Cat 5e.

And that it only needs a Gen3x1-slot or USB3.2 Gen2 to deliver it's full bandwith, while 10GbE needs Gen3x2/Gen4x1 or USB3.2 Gen2x2/USB4. But I think all those Realtek 5GbE-NICs on recent mainboards are a scam, too, and just a way to deny us 10GbE a bit longer.

It will be interesting if these NICs will be cheaper or more efficient than Marvell Aquantia AQC113C.

 

[TheLostSwede]

And that it only needs a Gen3x1-slot or USB3.2 Gen2 to deliver it's full bandwith, while 10GbE needs Gen3x2/Gen4x1 or USB3.2 Gen2x2/USB4. But I think all those Realtek 5GbE-NICs on recent mainboards are a scam, too, and just a way to deny us 10GbE a bit longer.

True.
Hardly a scam, as they seem to have replaced 2.5 Gbps chips.

It will be interesting if these NICs will be cheaper or more efficient than Marvell Aquantia AQC113C.

Yes and yes is the answers to those questions. I can guarantee that they will be. The AQC113C is apparently a 3.5 Watt-ish chip, whereas the Realtek chips are around 1.8 Watts, so almost half the power draw.
Realtek was also running a demo, that I would take with a pinch of salt, where they claimed their new chips work over 100 meter of Cat 6A when connected to a Broadcom switch, whereas the Marvell chips only synced at 5 Gbps.

 

[Tigerfox]

It is interesting that they made fibre-variants, too. 10GbE-fiber-NICs are somewhat old, because enterprise business moved to 25GbE+, so all you get is Gen3x4/x8 and either Intel X710, Marvell Aquantia AQC100CS or Broadcomm BCM57421. You could only get a used (Nvidia) Mellanox Connectx-3. Meanwhile, Intel just updated its X550 to E610 with Gen4x4 and ~50% less power draw. Guess fibre doesn't get much more efficient.

 

[Octopuss]

But isn't Realtek total junk? I believe noone touches that in workstation and server (or like homelab) segments.

 

[TheLostSwede]

But isn't Realtek total junk? I believe noone touches that in workstation and server (or like homelab) segments.

Their 2.5 Gbps Ethernet chips work better than Intel's...

And no, that might've been true a decade or so ago, but not these days.

It is interesting that they made fibre-variants, too. 10GbE-fiber-NICs are somewhat old, because enterprise business moved to 25GbE+, so all you get is Gen3x4/x8 and either Intel X710, Marvell Aquantia AQC100CS or Broadcomm BCM57421. You could only get a used (Nvidia) Mellanox Connectx-3. Meanwhile, Intel just updated its X550 to E610 with Gen4x4 and ~50% less power draw. Guess fibre doesn't get much more efficient.

The fibre one is at 1.1 Watt, I want to see any of these other cards beating that. Does it have the same features? Most likely not. These products aren't really intended to replace the ones you mentioned though.

 

[Octopuss]

Good to know.
I had to get rid of a 10Gbit NIC a while ago because of my new graphic card, and being stuck with gigabit connection is a pain in the arse even if it's mostly just the PC backups that are annoyingly long. Hopefully my next PC upgrade will let me grab a card with SFP+ and supporting everything from 1 to 10Gb. Might even be able to find a switch that supports that by then.

 

[ymdhis]

About damn time. Let's just hope they'll get the implementation right though, realtek network devices are widely known in the NAS community to be the most horrible things ever.

 

[Snoop05]

At last years Computex there was a suggestion about "sub-$100 5GbE switch" powered by RTL9303+RTL8251B PHYs, almost a year later i'm still not aware of devices at least remotely apporaching this and more specifically "modern" 5G switches being almost nonexistent.

 

[Igb]

To be honest, I am more interested in 10Gbit switches becoming more affordable.

If you get a bit savvy on eBay, you can already snag old Intel X540-T1 cards for 20~30€.
Though not officially supported in Windows 11, the Windows 10 drivers still work just fine, only requiring you to manually install them.
Both my home server and my main rig have had a pair of these running without any issues for a few years now.

The biggest roadblock to larger adaption, in my eyes at least, is the price of switches.
Even today, the least expensive 10Gbit switch I can find, with only two 10Gbit ports, is still over 100€, with four ports costing a minimum of 200€.
Compared to an eight port 2.5Gbit switch, which can be had for around 55€, or standard 1Gbit switches which cost basically nothing, getting your house connected gets expensive fast.
My hope is that these new chips will push the price 10Gbit switches way down.

Once they start getting put into standard home routers, or those modem/router combo boxes that ISPs give out, then we will really be getting somewhere!

I totally agree with you. I paid over 250€ some years ago for the TL-SX105, and I had to purchase it from another country because even at that price they were quite scarce in Europe. And about a year ago a port suddenly died, so I am not very happy with it (neither too unhappy since it still serves me properly and for me it was totally worth for faster backups, but you get the point, and just when warranty is over to top it off)

I want to add that the second (and still big) problem with 10GbE is power consumption. I have several X540T1 and T2 cards, and despite the price and reliability they can consume up to 10W (and even in idle 5W+) which is a lot, specially for 24/7 or homelab usage. It is about 25% of the power consumed by my NAS at home, even counting the 3 mechanical HDDs. Also, X540 uses ancient PCIe 2.0, with a lot of lanes, it makes it quite inconvenient on modern plaforms. The opposite will hapen with these from what I can tell (only 1 lane is a problem if you intend to plug that in anything that is not PCIe 4.0, even in 3.0 you are leaving some performance on the table at only 8Gbps theoretical)

I also prefer 550T1/T2 since they support 2.5Gbe and 5Gbe and draw a little less power, but they are becoming very expensive lately.

So... I welcome both improvements. And I also hope the bring down the prices of the switches.

 

[TheLostSwede]

At last years Computex there was a suggestion about "sub-$100 5GbE switch" powered by RTL9303+RTL8251B PHYs, almost a year later i'm still not aware of devices at least remotely apporaching this and more specifically "modern" 5G switches being almost nonexistent.

I found this, but yes, they are really rare.

SR-S5G1008

www.cirinet.com

 

[DaemonForce]

Finally a g4x1 adapter for 10GbE NON-SFP? Only 2W consumption? MASSIVE Realtek W.
Single connection SFP model at a mere 1W? Another MASSIVE Realtek W.
These even compete with the prices of my SolarFlare and HP SFP cards.
Those are some fast af boi 1-2 punches. I hope for mobo integrations like this next gen.

 

[snapdragon]

I doubt just because it's cheaper we will see it on less expensive motherboards...

 

[TheLostSwede]

Finally a g4x1 adapter for 10GbE NON-SFP? Only 2W consumption? MASSIVE Realtek W.
Single connection SFP model at a mere 1W? Another MASSIVE Realtek W.
These even compete with the prices of my SolarFlare and HP SFP cards.
Those are some fast af boi 1-2 punches. I hope for mobo integrations like this next gen.

They already have some motherboard design wins.

Finally a g4x1 adapter for 10GbE NON-SFP? Only 2W consumption? MASSIVE Realtek W.
Single connection SFP model at a mere 1W? Another MASSIVE Realtek W.
These even compete with the prices of my SolarFlare and HP SFP cards.
Those are some fast af boi 1-2 punches. I hope for mobo integrations like this next gen.

They already have some motherboard design wins.

I doubt just because it's cheaper we will see it on less expensive motherboards...

It should cut the BOM cost, but yeah...

 

[Rightness_1]

I always found it very interesting that both Realtek and Intel had EXACTLY the same issues with their 2.5Gb NICs randomly dropping connections, and requiring powering off the PC to fix it... Both required multiple revisions of their chips to fix this... Very odd...

 

[Octopuss]

So since switches were repeatedly mentioned, is anyone aware of anything I can replace my TP-Link T1700G-28TQ with? I am looking for something that has some 2,5GBit ports and can do full range of speeds up to and including 10Gbit on the SFP+ ones (of which I don't need more than two).