If computer clocks max out somewhere around 5GHz, how is it possible for 100Gbit internet to exist? How does the computer possibly transfer that much data per second?
In: 591
1 GHz means the processor does **something** 1 billion times per second. In modern 64 bit processors that **something** is usually one step of an instruction that contains 64 bits of information about what you are doing and where you are getting the data from to do that thing. The data itself is fetched from memory or PCIe lanes that have more than one wire, so for every time the signal changes and **something** goes into the CPU, more than 1 bit of data enters the CPU.
It is incredibly intense to do this though. First off, you need the latest PCIe or other exotic connection methods to even hook up state of the art networking cards at full speed. And you WILL often run out of CPU power try to move that much data. Special-purpose networking hardware is used to offload some of the tasks the CPU isn’t good enough at, like decoding encrypted data or forwarding (routing) data to its destination – you can get raw data transfer speeds simultaneously in/out of a relatively cheap network switch that you cannot get from a computer because the switch is so specialized while the computer’s processor is actually slower for these relatively simple, but very fast tasks.
And while high-performance datacenter machines might use 100Gb or even faster, you might see 100Gb used to carry traffic between 2 locations in a building or 2 buildings in 1 organization, but it carries data which is ultimately split up and sent to many computers at a much slower speed. So the most economical way to use 100Gb is to *not talk directly to any computer’s CPU at those speeds* and instead only use this to transfer through specialized networking gear.
Latest Answers