Editors’ Picks: Digital Discoveries

Tuan Nguyen, Editor-in-Chief, and Alan Dexter, Executive Editor switch on to the future

NETGEAR PROSAFE XS708E

Gigabit Ethernet is so dead. For me, anyway. If you do a lot of file transfers over a network, like I do, you might consider stepping up your network game—to 10Gb Ethernet. At these speeds, even the fastest SATA SSDs can’t come close, since they top out at a theoretical 6Gb/s. When upgrading my home to 10GbE, I needed a switch that could manage the insane speeds. I picked Netgear’s ProSAFE XS708E.

The problem with upgrading to 10Gb/s Ethernet is that everything in your infrastructure needs upgrading, too. Most consumer motherboards don’t have anything faster than 1Gb/s Ethernet, and all consumer routers and switches top out at the same speed. All my machines had to be upgraded to 10GbE by using add-in network cards, and all the in-wall cabling had to be gutted as well; you have to upgrade to Cat6.

After all the setup was completed, and end-points on the network operating at 10GbE, the old switch came out and the new XS708E came in. Verdict? I’m never going back to standard gigabit speeds ever again. The XS708E is basically the cheapest 10GbE switch you can get. If you’re interested in 900MB/s and faster transfer speeds, this is the way to go. $850, www.netgear.com

MAXON CINEBENCH H R15

Sorry, I’m going to talk about benchmarking again. I did intend to look at a brilliant piece of hardware we’ve been playing with, but then Intel went and released Broadwell-E— sorry, I mean the Core i7-6950X (reviewed pg. 72)—and thus I find myself slack of jaw sitting in front of Cinebench. The reason for this mandible loosening may seem mundane, but having more little boxes than before spiraling their way to a ray-traced image is exciting. At least for this old hack.

Each of those rendering squares is powered by its own thread, you see. And this being the top-end Broadwell-E chip, it has no fewer than 20 threads, thanks to the HyperThreading of its 10 physical cores. It’s akin to having 20 CPUs in your PC, each one beavering away on its own little task.

This is going to be the real challenge for developers—how to utilize these cores in a meaningful way. And with such a range of core counts, it’s hard for developers to know how many cores to properly code for. The good news is that the minimum number of cores in modern chips is pretty much fixed at four—even Core i3s have four logical cores, thanks to HyperThreading. Even so, it’s going to be some time before the 20-thread 6950X represents the norm. Free, www.maxon.net