Thread Links Date Links
Thread Prev Thread Next Thread Index Date Prev Date Next Date Index

Re: 850 nm solutions




Roy,

My thoughts on this thread are coupled within


> There is nothing evil about economic and business considerations.  I recognize the economic advantage of developing silicon that
> will work in multiple standards.  I recognize that the cost of talented personnel along with other manufacturing and competitive
> issues tends to favor reduction of diversity.

I don't believe you can say this ... at least I can't, anyway.  As competitors, vendors, or customers, we come to some of the same
conclussions simply because the answer makes sense to each of us as individuals.  ie, how many different ways can you come up with
Einstein's theory of Relativity?  how many ways can you describe divergence?  I suspect when it gets down to it ... most ways will be
pretty much close to the same, baring incidents from WEBSTER.  And it has nothing to do with great minds think alike.  I reckon it has
more to do with 'solutions to complex problems that make sense'.

> I recognize that there may be individuals  in the P802.3ae TF that stand to benefit
> directly, or whose company would benefit economically depending on how the standard is defined.  There is nothing evil about that.
> As a customer, the only benefit that I or the company that I work for receives, is the manor in which the users would be enabled by
> the standard.

We all have customers.  But there is one thing bothering me about your comments as a customer.  I notice you never use an email address
from your company.  Does that mean that your peers don't agree with you?  Does that mean that your own customers don't agree with you?
See, the good thing and the bad thing about IEEE802.3 is that it is a large group of people - so we don't bias one way.  You may hear
things that indicate it is biased, but I really don't think the votes will show that in the long run.  Besides, as I recall, after IEEE
is done with it, the com-si org has to vote on it and most of those people are not IEEE802 members.  They should be - Geoff could shed
some light here.  So if the industry felt that one group biased the standard, it is likely that the standard would get squashed.

But your thoughts as a customer pretty much scare me because you never use your company email - indicating to me that all your thoughts
are strictly your own and not those shared by peers and your own customers ......

> As a customer who deploys very high bandwidth and extremely large networks, I want consistent standards, but I want them specialized
> for the functions they are to perform.  Over the years, the larger vendors have created more "generalized", like Microsoft's Windows
> NT.  For mediocre desktop and server usage it will do.  For people that require better or more reliable performance go to other
> vendors and products.  While this may not have greatly effected Microsoft's market in low end systems, it has almost no share in the
> very high end technology market.  10GbE is targeted at the high end technology market.  The 10GbE WAN compatible PHY is targeted for
> an extremely large but very specialized market.  As a representative customer of that high end technology industry market, I would
> prefer to have what I need in the standard, "up front".  Instead I may have to shop around for vendors that will deviate from  that
> standard in order to deliver what is required, much like some large customers requiring vendors to support jumbo frames.  This was
> also the comment by another customer concerning the need for short reach 10GbE interfaces.
>
> The majority of the individuals in the P802.3ae TF are "LAN" people.  They understand the needs of a LAN only PHY.  There are some
> that also work with WAN systems.  Both the "LAN" and "WAN" people recognize that the needs are different between LAN systems and WAN
> systems.  An attempt to combine the LAN and WAN into one "UniPHY" will result in a standard that does not properly address the needs
> of either the LAN or the WAN.
>
> Last year, 1.6 terabit per second DWDM systems were field tested.  Those transport systems can provide 160 10GbE WAN channels per
> fiber.  Internet content sites are increasing exponentially all over the world, with aggregated transport bandwidths getting into
> the 10s of terabits per second per site.  Facilities floor space density is becoming a critical issue.  The port density as well as
> per port bandwidth on data switches and servers is becoming a critical issue.  The complexity of intra-cluster port usage in storage
> servers as well as data switches is becoming a critical issue.  All of this is leading to the need for data switches with multiples
> of terabits per second in aggregate bandwidth per chassis, and interface cards with multiple 10Gb ports each.
>
> The industry needs very condensed form factor equipment, the kind that will not need to have 18" of etch between the MAC and PCS.

Roy - regardless of what my boss tells me, I am not going to route 32 or 64 or greater LVDS lines between the mac and the pcs.  I am
just not going to do it.  I don't care if it is 2in or 50in.  That kind of routing resource screws up the enitre layout and can add
weeks to the board design.  Not to mention tons of other things.

And the absolute cool thing is that I can use this interface for other things to keep commonality in the system for the simple reason
that any standard Geoff Thompson has ever been involved in is very well defined ( I don't like have to address everyone as MR or MRS or
whatever like a few people have been doing?  Is there some new rule? )

I think it is important that XAUI be defined.  I think it is important to keep XAUI transparent.  But, as I recall from every discussion
or meeting .... XAUI is transparent or intended to be.  Unless I missed some discussion or didn't understand it, there is no requirement
that I have XAUI.


> The industry needs  a protocol that has as much bandwidth efficiency as possible because the transport signaling speed is fixed.
> The industry needs transport operations and performance management based on existing systems so that it does not have to deploy
> entirely greenfield operations support systems as well as untried greenfield transport technology.
>
> It is the above reasons that I, as a customer, have taken a stand that XAUI should be 100% transparent as far as the standard is
> concerned.  This will allow vendors in the future to build very high density systems, with small form factors per port, without the
> additional symbol overhead that a non-transparent XAUI would put on non-XAUI MAC/PCS interfaces.  At the same time, a transparent
> XAUI will allow vendors to build systems today that do need the extended etch distance.

Roy, I will disagree with you.  An interface like XAUI will be the connection of choice over the XGMII type interfaces or even the
U-4/POS-4 interfaces being defined in ATM-F.  In communications, even Infiniband won't cut it because we can't get the 10gig of
throughput to make it worth using.

> As a customer, I have taken a stand that
> the LAN PHY and the WAN compatible PHY should be separate tracks within P802.3ae, according to the objectives as written.  This will
> allow for short reach block encoded parallel solutions for the LAN PHY and a single serial scrambled synchronous solution for the
> WAN compatible PHY.  As a customer, I have also taken a stand that the SONET mapping proposal by Paul Bottroff and David Martin,
> modified to allow for 10Byte IPG compression, be standardized instead of the 64B/66B block encoding for the WAN compatible PHY.
> This will allow for the highest data transfer bandwidth available with the shortest amount of  time to market.
>
> Thank you,
> Roy Bynum

I don't know, Roy, but I would sure like to spend more time discussing differential peak to peak then about how the standard is fixed
cause thats what one large company wants.

Joel Goergen

>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: THALER,PAT (A-Roseville,ex1) <pat_thaler@agilent.com>
> To: Roy Bynum <rabynum@mindspring.com>; THALER,PAT (A-Roseville,ex1) <pat_thaler@agilent.com>; Rick Walker
> <walker@cutter.hpl.hp.com>; <stds-802-3-hssg@ieee.org>
> Sent: Monday, May 01, 2000 7:05 PM
> Subject: RE: 850 nm solutions
>
> > Roy,
> >
> > This is a frustrating discussion. You seem intent on twisting what is said
> > and implying evil actions. I did not say different groups developed Hari and
> > XAUI. What I said is that the Infiniband TA did not develop Hari. I should
> > know, I've been there from the beginning and in the Future IO before that.
> >
> > Over my career, I've seen a number of times when separate groups applied
> > existing technologies to the same or similar problems and came up with
> > similar solutions. For instance, there were about 4 proposals for 10BASE-T
> > developed independently by different companies that when examined were
> > almost identical. It wasn't because we co-developed them. It was because
> > taking as a departure point what we had learned about twisted-pair cable
> > as an industry and applying that to how to run Manchester code over it,
> > a certain direction was fairly attractive and 4 out of 6 companies
> > investigating
> > it came up with very similar solutions. There were minor differences such as
> > the
> > choice of where to put the equalizer, but mostly it was the same solution.
> > That is the source of much of the "commonality" to which you refer.
> >
> > "Hari" was developed with Ethernet in Fibre Channel in mind (to the best of
> > my
> > understanding; I did not work in that group). But Hari as a name really
> > didn't fit into the names 802.3 has used for interfaces. Therefore, a
> > proposal
> > based on the Hari work suggests "XAUI" as a name that does fit in with
> > traditional Ethernet interface names.
> >
> > I have no idea what you are talking about when you talk about different
> > groups with the same people. Your statement about voting blocks is totally
> > unjustified and offensive.
> >
> > Sincerely,
> > Pat Thaler