HDMI as Ethernet

[Poet129]

Is there a way to use as HDMI to communicate between two pcs like normal Ethernet would the main reason is it is a ~50 Gbps connection this would be amazing to use as networking resource. Any ideas?

[RadiatingLight]

Not to my knowledge, especially not with normal equipment.

Other things to consider is that HDMI is not bidirectional 50Gbps (only one way, from the source to output)

[emosun]

not only is it single direction but thats 50gbps of data thats already in the vram and not on a storage device

[Poet129]

what about two HDMI cables connecting the systems?

[Windows7ge]

At the end of the day the HDMI cable would be nothing more than wires. Without proper network controllers on both ends you'd still be limited to Gigabit or 10Gbit.

[RadiatingLight]

Just now, Poet129 said:

what about two HDMI cables connecting the systems?

It's important to note that the HDMI cable itself is nothing special, just a bunch of wires going from one place to another. The special part is the equipment that drives the HDMI cable. Network cards have a lot more work to do in order to process 50Gbps of packets compared to a graphics card outputting 50Gbps of video. Network cards have to queue packets, do a lot more communication between computers, more frequent handshakes to make sure everything is going okay, encrypt and decrypt packet headers, include checksums, etc. As a result, 10Gbps of usable information =/= 10Gbps of total data going through the cable in the case of ethernet, and the overhead is much lower with video signals.

By the time you set up two HDMI cables for 50Gbps bidirectional (which will be substantially lower after processing overhead), you might as well just team together 2 10gbps ethernet cables and call it a day.

[Poet129]

I don't have any 10 gigabit nics though but even 10 gigabit is faster then one.

[Windows7ge]

5 minutes ago, Poet129 said:

I don't have any 10 gigabit nics though but even 10 gigabit is faster then one.

If you really wanted to experiment with this you could pick up some 40Gbit NICs then jerryrig together something like a QSFP+ to Female HDMI adapter and link the two together. Assuming it doesn't just let out the magic smoke and spontaneously combust you could test the speed with perhaps iperf. I don't actually know if iperf is capable of testing 40Gbit but it's worth trying.

[Poet129]

Is there any kind of software that could communicate via the graphics card?

[Slayerking92]

https://www.cmple.com/learn/learning-center-hdmi-cables-with-ethernet

 

First, an important disclaimer. For the Ethernet connection to work properly, you must be connecting two devices which each support Ethernet over HDMI (they’ll be labeled HEC compatible), and not many do just yet. In many ways, you are planning for the future as much as for the present when buying an HDMI cable with Ethernet. Here are the ways these forward-looking cables can work, though.