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Comment by ReverseCold | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand this article! PC motherboards with 10GbE ports have existed for years in premium offerings? Is this notably cheaper than the current chip they use?

pcpartpicker shows ~89 such boards, with mid-high level pricing: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#c0=2x10000-2x...

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The article shows an add-in board and says it's $10.

If that's retail price, it's not much more than a 1G add-in nic. That gives it potential for mass adoption.

Realtek also makes some low cost 10g and 2.5g/10g switch chips that are reasonable cost if you shop on aliexpress.

Having another vendor should help drive down retail pricing as well.

The article contradicts itself. The text says that the chip will be sold for $10. The headline says the board will be sold for $10.

Generally editors write headlines while the journalist writes the text, so when they conflict, the headline is usually wrong.

A $10 retail price for a board would be a big deal.

A $10 wholesale price for a chip is not news.

With such a low price point, it will creep into regular, non-prosumer hardware.

But $10 is not a cheap price point - if it's a component on a motherboard, it really needs to be sub 25 cents in 10k volume orders before motherboard manufacturers start shoving it into mid level boards just to have one more bullet point on the spec sheet of a motherboard which sells for $50.

The current 1G components are already 4x-8x that cost in volume. Much like 100M never seemed to quite go away for decades (and still hasn't in certain areas), this doesn't need to hit the bottom barrel to still hit cheap motherboards. Especially for people buying by components, many "entry level" A620 motherboards launched 2 years ago already had 2.5G NICs.

It may be a bit longer before random PCs at Walmart have 10G more often than not but it won't be long at all for "mid range" motherboards you're talking about.

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