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Comment by metafex | Hacker News Reader

Damn, a Thunderbolt 2 PCIe card with two ports costs ~55€. That would make for one hell of a replacement for 10G Ethernet. Double the speed and cheaper. Does anyone know how the linux support for this is?

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10GbE cost is dominated by expensive switches, not by the cost of ethernet cards.

This aside, Thunderbolt is not switched, so comparison is meaningless. There are very few opportunities where you use either Thunderbolt or Ethernet for the same application. The topology is very different.

If you're willing to leave the cisco/Arista/etc cocoon, NIC costs are actually the big ticket items.

http://whiteboxswitch.com/collections/10-gigabit-ethernet-sw...

$5595 for the switch, $699 for the software. You can split the 4 40G ports into 16 10G ports using splitter cables, giving a total of 64 10G ports: (5595+699)/64 = $98.34 per 10G port.

A 1M cable is $30 from here: http://www.fiberyes.com/sfp-cable-cab-10gsfp-p1m-30

So $122.34 for switch and cable.

I've never seen a 10G NIC that cheap per port.

(disclosure: I co-founded Cumulus, who is behind the software in this price comparison)

The problem for hobbyists is that they usually want to buy more like 8 ports, not 64.

Still, for simple high-bandwidth networking needs it should suffice.

Look at used infiniband gear, you will get much better support (hardware, software, cabling). Same price or lower.

All the addon cards I've seen are PCIe-2.0 x4 cards, thats 2GB/sec each direction. A single thunderbolt 2 ports would need ~2.5GB/sec each direction to 'max out', a pair would need 5GB/sec. They seem to be assuming a significant amount of the TB bandwidth will be used by the video passthrough capability. That makes these cards a not so great option if your goal is only to connect high speed external devices, not monitors.

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