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Comment by nubinetwork | Hacker News Reader

Single gigabit NIC? I don't get why they don't include more, given the 3 x16 pcie slots...

I think that's a reasonable decision. Devs who need lots of networking throughput usually have their own NICs cards from a preferred vendor (with the necessary features) anyways.

I don't think a single gigabit nic is really reasonable on something as light as a raspberry pi, and this sure isn't that. Multigig has been out for years and ten gig for even longer. It's kind of ridiculous that things are still stuck on gigabit.

I just specced out a new network for a friend's business (they call it an intentional community.. ~50-100 people on-site each day, most are digital nomads).

They were willing to spend whatever it took to provide reliable WiFi throughout the ~20 acre property. Equipment cost was concern #4 or #5.

We still went with gigabit fixtures and not 2.5G. The ISPs were only providing a 200mbps pipe (symmetrical), intra-LAN communication is not super common in this type of deployment, and no client devices currently on-property supported 2.5G.

So, yeah, for us, it still made sense to go with gigabit. Even when we look out over the next 5 years (expected lifetime of this new equipment) we didn't see the need for 2.5G growing _that much_.

> It's kind of ridiculous that things are still stuck on gigabit.

I’ve been under the impression that there are patents (expiring soon) keeping the cost of 10G hardware high enough to prevent it from becoming the default choice. I don’t have a concrete source for that info though.

The other side of this is that I'd rather have the slots and a minimal on-board NIC so that I can install a 100g nic of my choosing. I hate motherboards where they force you to take 2x 10G rj45 ports that I'll never use and which burns power until/unless I can figure out how to disable them and recover the power.

Do they really burn that much power if not active? I had naively assumed that there was a simple detection circuit to keep most of the equipment deactivated until use.

An sfp slot with an unused module does pull power from the switch/nic, but that shouldn't be an issue if you pull out the module. (I don't know if rj45 based connectors draw power)

If you look at "Developer Platform" the prebuild model. There's a option to add a 4x10GbE NIC.

They offer a 4x10Gb NIC in their larger offer on the bottom of the page. I'd guess they would throw that in, if you throw some more money at them.

Optional 4x10GbE on the COM-HPC Ampere Altra module.

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