Pros and cons of having a NIC????

[Zniff]

I have a question about why having an NIC that is not integrated into the motherboard, but rather using one that is not an integrated one.

What are the pros and cons, what makes the difference?

[jaslion]

Cons:

 

You lose a pcie slot

 

Neutral:

 

It's a ethernet port

 

Pros:

 

Dunno you probably have a use for it?

[whispous]

the pro is that you might be buying one for it's extra networking speed or features.

[x3no]

It is more useful in servers world when those NIC's are offloading CPU with processing. 

[whispous]

Just now, x3no said:

It is more useful in servers world when those NIC's are offloading CPU with processing. 

Well, in a few rare occasions.

[mariushm]

Nothing wrong with an integrated nic, it's fine for most consumers.  But sometimes you need extra nics or separate cards. 

 

The onboard network may be only 1 gbps, while the NIC may do 2.5 gbps / 5 gbps / 10 gbps or even higher. 

 

In the past, onboard network chips were more basic, while chips on some cards had hardware offloading and acceleration features, which would result in less cpu usage, especially when high traffic or lots of connections - I'm saying in the times of Athlon XP / Barton, Pentium 4, D805 etc ... you could see the difference between an onboard network card and a "professional" network card while hosting a chat server  or direct connect server with 3000+ connected users (a large number of connections were handled better by higher end network cards)  

 

You may have a NAS or some other devices that only have optical connectors (SFP, SFP+, QSFP28 etc)

 

You may use a dedicated network connection to an industrial machine (CNC, pick and place machine, engraver, sewing machine, whatever) or some specialized computer component ... some could crash or fail or cause issues if other computers try to access them (ex broadcasting something to them or pinging them while your computer streams a list of commands or something)

 

Fancier network cards have stuff like RDMA ( dumping traffic directly into ram through the pci-e, without loading the CPU with it) , virtual network cards (one card shows up as 16 separate network cards, so you could assign one to each virtual machine you have ... and so on... 

 

 

[x3no]

One more thing, I was using one because I needed multiple ports.

[mariushm]

Just saw a presentation from Netflix yesterday, where they show how they use servers with a couple Mellanox-6 NICs  (each with 2 x 100gbps ports) to push up to 400 gbps of ENCRYPTED streams to people, and the encryption is done on the network cards' processors  instead of cpu ... so that's another use for NICs I guess. 

[gsrfan01]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

Just saw a presentation from Netflix yesterday, where they show how they use servers with a couple Mellanox-6 NICs  (each with 2 x 100gbps ports) to push up to 400 gbps of ENCRYPTED streams to people, and the encryption is done on the network cards' processors  instead of cpu ... so that's another use for NICs I guess. 

Check out DPUs https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/05/20/whats-a-dpu-data-processing-unit/

Pretty much little SOCs on the network card that way processing can be done on-ca

[Alex Atkin UK]

8 minutes ago, gsrfan01 said:

Check out DPUs https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/05/20/whats-a-dpu-data-processing-unit/

Pretty much little SOCs on the network card that way processing can be done on-ca

People often overlook that a LOT of cards, such as WiFi, effectively have their own SoC.  Were well into a time where its not just "a computer" any more, its multiple computers all working together.

 

Ironically audio went the other direction, sound cards became dumber because its easier to do all the mixing in software on the CPU.  Its why you can actually find sound quality differs between Windows and Linux.  (Linux used to sound better to me, I don't think you can really tell the difference these days though)

[gsrfan01]

29 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

People often overlook that a LOT of cards, such as WiFi, effectively have their own SoC.  Were well into a time where its not just "a computer" any more, its multiple computers all working together.

 

Ironically audio went the other direction, sound cards became dumber because its easier to do all the mixing in software on the CPU.  Its why you can actually find sound quality differs between Windows and Linux.  (Linux used to sound better to me, I don't think you can really tell the difference these days though)

Everything is computers all the way down. SSDs, NICs, WiFi, switches...

[mtz_federico]

9 hours ago, mariushm said:

Just saw a presentation from Netflix yesterday, where they show how they use servers with a couple Mellanox-6 NICs  (each with 2 x 100gbps ports) to push up to 400 gbps of ENCRYPTED streams to people, and the encryption is done on the network cards' processors  instead of cpu ... so that's another use for NICs I guess. 

That sounds interesting, do you have a link to that presentation?

[mariushm]

9 minutes ago, mtz_federico said:

That sounds interesting, do you have a link to that presentation?

Yeah, it was a thread on reddit:

 

 

Here's the PDF in case it gets deleted :  https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2021.pdf

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

12 hours ago, gsrfan01 said:

Everything is computers all the way down. SSDs, NICs, WiFi, switches...

True, but for example on early routers they often wouldn't have a Switch or WiFi, just multiple NICs hardwired into the SoC.  So they were pretty much a single SoC doing everything.  But as things have gotten more complex the lines have blurred so even SOHO switches are starting to get actual routing capabilities and WiFi is less and less fixed-function so that standards can be partly upgraded in software. (eg WPA3)

Its gotten to the point where the lines are so blurred there, OpenWRT are starting to support switches.