The specification for 800GbE doubles the maximum speed of the current Ethernet standard, but also tweaks other aspects including latency. Credit: Martyn Williams/IDGNS The industry-backed Ethernet Technology Consortium has announced the completion of a specification for 800 Gigabit Ethernet technology. Based on many of the technologies used in the current top-end 400 Gigabit Ethernet protocol, the new spec is formally known as 800GBASE-R. The consortium that designed it (then known as the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium) was also instrumental in developing the 25, 50, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet protocols and includes Broadcom, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft among its members. The 800GbE spec adds new media access control (MAC) and physical coding sublayer (PCS) methods, which tweaks these functions to distribute data across eight physical lanes running at a native 106.25Gbps. (A lane can be a copper twisted pair or in optical cables, a strand of fiber or a wavelength.) The 800GBASE-R specification is built on two 400 GbE 2xClause PCSs to create a single MAC which operates at a combined 800Gbps. And while the focus is on eight 106.25G lanes, it’s not locked in. It is possible to run 16 lanes at half the speed, or 53.125Gbps. The new standard offers half the latency of 400G Ethernet specification, but the new spec also cuts the forward error correction (FEC) overhead on networks running at 50 Gbps, 100 Gbps, and 200 Gbps by half, thus reducing the packet-processing load on the NIC. By lowering latency this will feed the need for speed in latency-sensitive applications like high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, where lots of data needs to be moved around as fast as possible. Doubling from 400G to 800G wasn’t too great of a technological leap. It meant adding more lanes at the same transfer rate, with a few tweaks. But breaking a terabit, something Cisco and other networking firms have been talking about for a decade, will require a significant reworking of the technology and won’t be an easy fix. It likely won’t be cheap, either. 800G works with existing hardware and 400GbE switches are not cheap, running as high as six figures. Moving past the terabit barrier with a major revision to the technology will likely be even more expensive. But for hyperscalers and HPC customers, that’s par for the course. The ETC didn’t say when to expect new hardware supporting the 800G, but given its modest change to existing specs, it could appear this year, assuming the pandemic-induced shutdown doesn’t throw a monkey wrench into plans. Related content news analysis AMD launches Instinct AI accelerator to compete with Nvidia AMD enters the AI acceleration game with broad industry support. First shipping product is the Dell PowerEdge XE9680 with AMD Instinct MI300X. By Andy Patrizio Dec 07, 2023 6 mins CPUs and Processors Generative AI Data Center news analysis Western Digital keeps HDDs relevant with major capacity boost Western Digital and rival Seagate are finding new ways to pack data onto disk platters, keeping them relevant in the age of solid-state drives (SSD). By Andy Patrizio Dec 06, 2023 4 mins Enterprise Storage Data Center news Omdia: AI boosts server spending but unit sales still plunge A rush to build AI capacity using expensive coprocessors is jacking up the prices of servers, says research firm Omdia. By Andy Patrizio Dec 04, 2023 4 mins CPUs and Processors Generative AI Data Center news AWS and Nvidia partner on Project Ceiba, a GPU-powered AI supercomputer The companies are extending their AI partnership, and one key initiative is a supercomputer that will be integrated with AWS services and used by Nvidia’s own R&D teams. By Andy Patrizio Nov 30, 2023 3 mins CPUs and Processors Generative AI Supercomputers Podcasts Videos Resources Events NEWSLETTERS Newsletter Promo Module Test Description for newsletter promo module. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe