Tesla's TTPoE at Hot Chips 2024: Replacing TCP for Low Latency Applications

Re:Tesla's TTPoE at Hot Chips 2024: Replacing TCP for Low La... by kardianos on Wednesday August 28, 2024 @10:08AM (#41379710)

This is a bad take. Here's my take: 1. Standard IP and Ethernet are physically acceptable for their use case. 2. TCP/IP is optimized in a number of areas for un-reliable networks. 3. Their clusters are not unreliable. 4. Their servers already offer hardware acceleration that can be programmed, so remove aspects of TCP/IP that increase latency or might negatively affect throughput. 5. They get to continue to purchase the cheaper IP switches and retain their existing hardware without retooling everything.

As an afterthought, they publish this for marketing/engineering pull for people who like to optimize (do engineering) for specific situations, while supporting the ROI and keeping cost down.

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Re:Tesla's TTPoE at Hot Chips 2024: Replacing TCP for Low La... by chipdart on Saturday August 31, 2024 @05:21PM (#41412101)

> This is a bad take. Here's my take: (...) 5. They get to continue to purchase the cheaper IP switches and retain their existing hardware without retooling everything.

OP's TCP offload engines do not require any retooling at all, if you consider stuff like buying IP switches not retooling. All you need to do is basically buy a network card.

Also, if you read the article you'll eventually stumble upon the bar chart where they claim that the one-way write latency of TTPoE is only 0.7E-6 seconds faster than existing tech like infiniband, and it's also the only somewhat hard data they show. Does that justify the investment of developing their whole software+hardware stack?

I'm sure the project was fun and should look great on a CV, but overall it doesn't look like it passes the smell test.

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