There is also one from Freetronics, which works with Arduino and I have also tested it with Netduino. You can also get a nice PoE adapter from them. Their shield is also based on the Wiznet 5100 chip, and has incorporated the following design features to hopefully help with any issues with the Arduino Ethernet Shield (taken from their website)
SPI Fixes
Combining Ethernet with other SPI
devices can be really tricky because
the Wiznet chip doesn't relinquish the
bus properly when it's deselected. To
fix that problem we slaved the
Wiznet's SEN (SPI Enable) line to the
CS (Chip Select) line, which means
that whenever your sketch deselects
the Ethernet connection in order to
talk to another SPI device it will
work exactly the way it should.
No more messing around with cutting
tracks and other nasty hacks you may
have seen mentioned on the forums.
Reset Fixes
We've also slaved the Ethernet
Shield's reset line to the Arduino
reset line, so if your Arduino is
reset the Ethernet Shield will
automatically reset as well. The
Wiznet reset line is also held active
for long enough to make it restart
reliably each time the Arduino itself
restarts.
Power Filtering Fixes
Ethernet connections are very
susceptible to electrical noise, so
the Wiznet chip has multiple ground
pins on two separate buses and they
need to be individually decoupled and
the buses linked by an inductor. We
took care of that by implementing
proper decoupling on the power and
ground rails, ensuring you get maximum
reliability even in electrically noisy
environments.
Let's get some terms straight first: An Ethernet interface is typically made from two parts: a MAC and a PHY. The MAC, Media Access Controller, handles all of the packet assembly, transmission, reception, and error checking. A PHY handles all of the PHYsical transport stuff like modulating the signal, managing the DC balancing, tracking baseband wander, etc.
There are some things that both sides do, to some extent. Both MAC and PHY do some level of data error detection. This is not redundant error detection, but just error detection that is related directly to the types of things that the MAC and PHY do. Also, both MAC and PHY are dependent on the packet nature of Ethernet. The MAC because it is using the packet nature to filter, route, and manage the data. The PHY because there are certain signal modulation/demodulation functions that require packets (and the space between packets) to function correctly.
The point is: You cannot get away from packets even if you just use the PHY. Of course, the packet headers do not have to be "standard" headers. And the CRC does not have to be a standard CRC. But you are still limited to the maximum packet length and inter-packet-gap that standard Ethernet requires. (Note: You might be able to do "jumbo" packets if both PHYs support it.)
There are many benefits to using standard Ethernet packet headers, however. We would refer to this as a "Layer 2" protocol. The main benefit is that you can use standard Ethernet switches to help connect different devices together.
You mention just connecting a "TDM stream" directly (more or less) to the PHY. Every time someone has said that to me they have been talking about running multi-channel digital audio over Ethernet. If that is the case then you have a bunch of other issues, like clock synchronization and error detection that will prevent you from doing it the easy way. I won't cover audio over Ethernet more in this answer, but tell me if that is what you want to do because I can add a lot more info in that case.
Historically there have been many products that have taken some sort of data stream and ran it over Cat-5 using Ethernet PHYs and FPGAs, but without traditional MACs. Some of them have used the proper Ethernet Layer 2 or Layer 3 packets, and some of them have not. Some have also used non-Ethernet technology like ATM or FDDI. Some of them have used FPGA's, but inside the FPGA is a more traditional CPU and MAC.
I hope that at this point you have realized that what you want to do (use an FPGA and PHY to transfer a data stream over Cat-5) is difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. Let me try to explain how difficult.
First, you will have to master FPGA logic design. Of all the professional FPGA logic designers I know of, this project is beyond the ability of maybe 95% of them. These are people who have been designing FPGAs for several years or even several decades. It will take you a long time to learn FPGAs enough to design this logic. Probably years if you are doing this as a hobby.
Next, you need to learn exactly what a MAC and PHY do, and how they interface. This is not as hard as learning FPGAs, but it isn't easy either. There are a lot of basic concepts that are important, but not easily learned.
Now you'll have to design a PCB to do all of this. Designing a reliable PCB that uses FPGAs, PHYs, and does all of the proper Ethernet signal integrity stuff is also not easy. Not super hard either. But on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being super easy, this PCB would be about a 6. Not hard for an experienced professional, but definitely hard for a non-professional-EE.
At this point you probably noticed that I didn't directly answer your questions. This was on purpose. I could answer your questions, but honestly that wouldn't help you. It would be like telling you how to build the second story of a house when you haven't figured out how to build the first story or even the foundation.
Start by learning everything about designing FPGAs that you can. Also learn everything about Ethernet that you can. There are lots of online resources from app notes, datasheets, and how-to's. Go to opencores.org and study their Ethernet MAC cores. Do this diligently and in a year you might be ready. And when you are ready then you will likely know the answers to 75% of your questions-- and you will be able to put the other 25% into proper context so when someone does give you an answer it will actually be useful to you.
Best Answer
A lot of the simpler SFP+ transceivers (direct attach copper cable, short-reach optical fiber) are really little more than analog devices and wouldn't care about the clock (fun fact: friends of mine use SFP optical transmitters to simply distribute a 10 MHz clock, and it works).
None of the stock networking hardware would be prepaed for a 50% rate mismatch, and I'd doubt their PLLs would lock reliably.
So, while point-to-point between devices using relatively dumb SFP+ transceivers might work with arbitrary clocks, I'd not expect functionality with stock networking hardware. It's more likely that you can convince your Zynq's transmitter to work at the full rate than that...
I don't know whether that's viable on your board, but maybe you could use the PCIe endpoints to have 2 or 4 lanes to a 10 GigE network card.