solidarity & god bless. i’ve been in visio most of the week making diagrams 😂

you get it

i love my job bc its launching rockets. but i think a lot of folks genuinely believe every day for me is standing inside a vehicle & typing into a CLI. it admittedly used to be a good bit of that kind of thing; since the network has matured, it is not that anymore

i posted this on twitter & some ppl took this weird. to clarify, this is not me complaining about my job

my point is no matter how cool something sounds sometimes it’s just working on spreadsheets & to do it u have to be prepared to do the less glamorous stuff

and, believe it or not, spreadsheets 💀

/sobs

played IRL for a looong time until i had to move to seattle 😭 now we play with discord + private server

glad you’re over the hump. life just gets shit sometimes, but it always gets better. hope you’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. kitties are definitely very helpful ☺️

ugh sorry to hear that :(

meanwhile the group chat

our last session will be 8 years later, & i work in aerospace for one of the largest private rocket companies in the world. my network has gone to space twice

this campaign has been with me through my career as a network engineer. it’s wild. it’s gonna be an emotional last session for me i fear 🤍

holy shit

sob

another caveat bc im sure someone is gonna ding me for this too: yes, an ASIC doesn’t need an ethernet PHY to talk to another component thats, say, on the same board. you could just have comms via MII between them. PHY is generally used to get stuff onto the wire/in the air as RF/whatever

caveat for “well, actually”s—MII is not a physical chip u can see on the board. the variants of MII are basically interface standards for signaling/clock frequencies

BUT sometimes u can open up a switch & see traces on the board between the ASIC & PHY. that’s where your MII logic is applied :)

tl;dr
ASIC = brain thinking
PHY = mouth speaking (although it does have logic of its own in there too)
MII variants = internal nervous system

Ethernet is teamwork actually

MII / GMII / SGMII / RGMII:
- the private lil interface between the ASIC’s MAC & the PHY
- sits inside the box, passing bits back & forth

ASIC:
- looks at frames
- decides where they go
- very smart, very dry, does not touch wires

PHY:
- negotiates link speed
- handles encoding / signaling
- pushes electrons (or photons), meaning bits

without the PHY, an ASIC is just thinking thoughts with nowhere to send em