Comment by adrian_b
5 hours ago
It says that it has four 10 Gb/s USB ports (2 Type A and 2 Type C).
It is unknown whether the ports are independent, or some of them or all of them are connected to an internal hub.
Even if they were connected to a single CPU port through an internal hub, if you used two 5 Gb/s USB Ethernet interfaces you would get close to full speed for them.
Having 10 Gb/s USB instead of the so-called "5 Gb/s" USB (in reality 4 Gb/s), provides much more additional I/O throughput than having 5 Gb/s RJ45 instead of 2.5 Gb/s. I agree that having 5 Gb/s Ethernet would have been nice, but it is much more valuable that it has 10 Gb/s USB, which is very rarely encountered on Arm-based computers.
They’re independent
I wonder how well a usb 10gbit ethernet adapter would work then
But I really apprecate your reply!
I'll definitely buy one for testing when they become available for reasonable prices <500EUR for 16gig memory
10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces work fine on 10 Gb/s USB.
Both interfaces have almost the same raw bit rate (in both cases "10 Gb/s" is only an approximation, but the differences between the true bit rates and 10 Gb/s are negligible, unlike for "5 Gb/s" USB, where the data bit rate is only 4 Gb/s).
The USB protocol has a slightly higher overhead than the Ethernet protocol, so the throughput of an Ethernet 10 Gb/s interface attached on 10 Gb/s USB will be a little lower than that of a PCIe NIC, but the difference is negligible, of only a few percent.
RTL8159 10GbE usb adapters seem to require USB3.2 Gen2 x2 and this seems to only have gen2
Hmm, is it possible to skip the Ethernet adapters in a configuration of USBC-Eth-Eth-USBC and connect USBCs directly one to another?
Unfortunately, USB does not work like Firewire, where this was possible.
USB 4, i.e. Thunderbolt, allows the emulation of network interfaces if you interconnect the USB Type C ports with a cable, but here you have USB 3, so this does not work.
On USB 3 you could interconnect 2 ports only if one of them implemented the On-the-Go specification, so it could work as either a peripheral port or a host port. Here this also does not work. On a system where this had been allowed by the hardware, it is likely that you would have needed to write yourself a device driver that emulates a network interface, because I am not aware of an already existing one, unlike for USB 4.
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