10GbE?

[Peter A Jonsson]

> to saturating a half-duplex connection. The question is, how much CPU
> would you need to bridge/route one (or a pair) of these guys?

CERN has a press release about a speed record at:
http://info.web.cern.ch/info/Press/PressReleases/Releases2003/PR15.03ESpeedrecord.html

My guess is that the limiting factor is the CPU. 

> Can anyone think of a good reason to use one of these things instead
> of a few 1xGE connections (like a quad port GE card?)

If you want to run one stream faster than 1 Gbit/s. Depending on
network equipment it might not work to load balance one stream over
several interfaces.

/ Peter