PCIe
This morning the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) is releasing the much-awaited final (1.0) specification for PCI Express 6.0. The next generation of the ubiquitous bus is once again doubling the data rate of a PCIe lane, bringing it to 8GB/second in each direction – and far, far higher for multi-lane configurations. With the final version of the specification now sorted and approved, the group expects the first commercial hardware to hit the market in 12-18 months, which in practice means it should start showing up in servers in 2023.
Update: PCI Express 6.0 Draft 0.71 Released, Final Release by End of Year
Update 07/02: Albeit a couple of days later than expected, the PCI-SIG has announced this morning that the PCI Express draft 0.71 specification has been released for member review...
103 by Ryan Smith on 7/2/2021Microchip Announces First PCIe 5.0 Switches
Building on their recent announcement of PCIe 5.0 retimers, Microchip has announced their first PCIe 5.0 switches, as part of their Switchtec PFX product line. On paper these look...
40 by Billy Tallis on 2/3/2021Microchip’s New PCIe 4.0 PCIe Switches: 100 lanes, 174 GBps
There are multiple reasons to need a PCIe switch. These can include expanding PCIe connectivity to more devices than the CPU is capable, to extend a PCIe fabric across...
36 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 6/1/2020Intel Initiates EOL for the VCA2: Three Xeons on a PCIe Card
One of Intel’s more interesting products over the recent years was its range of Visual Compute Accelerator cards, designed to help cloud streaming and encoding/decoding of HD and UHD...
4 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 5/12/2020PCIe 6.0 Specification Hits Version 0.5: On Track for 2021
PCI-SIG has released version 0.5 of the PCIe 6.0 specification to its members this week. The new, "first draft" version of the spec includes the feedback the group got...
74 by Anton Shilov on 2/21/2020Rambus Unveils PCIe 5.0 Controller & PHY
Rambus has developed a comprehensive PCIe 5.0 and CXL interface solution for chips built using 7 nm process technologies. The interface is now available for licensing by SoC designers...
17 by Anton Shilov on 11/13/2019PCIe 6.0 Dev Reaches v0.3; On-Track for a Full Specification In 2021
Having wrapped up their work on the PCI-Express 5.0 specification earlier this year, the PCI-SIG wasted no time in getting to work on the next version of the specification...
45 by Ryan Smith on 10/15/2019The Modular PC: Intel’s new Element brings Project Christine to Life
Way back at CES 2014, Razer’s CEO introduced a revolutionary concept design for a PC that had one main backplane and users could insert a CPU, GPU, power supply...
87 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 10/7/2019Gen-Z PHY Specification 1.1 Published: Adds PCIe 5.0, Gen-Z 50G Fabric
The Gen-Z Consortium this week released Physical Layer Specification 1.1 for Gen-Z interconnects. The new standard adds enhanced support for PCIe Gen 5 as well as Gen-Z 50G Fabric...
8 by Anton Shilov on 10/4/2019PCI Express Bandwidth to Be Doubled Again: PCIe 6.0 Announced, Spec to Land in 2021
When the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) first announced PCIe 4.0 a few years back, the group made it clear that they were not just going to make up...
120 by Ryan Smith on 6/18/2019Spotted at Computex: The Ultimate GPU Air Cooling Solution
Graphics cards and PCIe cards come with a limited set of cooling options. Some of the low TDP models are passive, before going up to active cooling on higher...
25 by Ian Cutress on 6/5/2019PCI-SIG Finalizes PCIe 5.0 Specification: x16 Slots to Reach 64GB/sec
Following the long gap after the release of PCI Express 3.0 in 2010, the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) set about a plan to speed up the development and...
55 by Ryan Smith on 5/29/2019GIGABYTE Shows PCIe 4.0 x16 Four-Way M.2 PCIe Add-In Card
We’ve seen some of these before – an add-in card that helps expand the M.2 capabilities of a system. Typically motherboards come with up to three M.2 slots, however...
9 by Ian Cutress on 5/29/2019AI On The Edge: New Flex Logix X1 Inference AI Chip For Fanless Designs
A large number of inference demonstrations published by the big chip manufacturers revolve around processing large batch sizes of images on trained networks. In reality, when video is being...
4 by Ian Cutress on 4/10/2019OSS Unveils 5-Way PCIe 4.0 Backplane, Demonstrates PCIe 4.0 HPC Platform
One Stop Systems this week introduced the industry’s first 5-way PCIe 4.0 backplane at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference. The OSS 5 Slot Gen 4 Backplane is designed primarily for...
5 by Anton Shilov on 3/22/2019Hot Chips 2018: NEC Vector Processor Live Blog
We saw this at Supercomputing last year: NEC's new Vector PCIe co-processor. I've wanted to write about it for a while, so I'm glad it's being presented here at...
9 by Ian Cutress on 8/21/2018Microsemi Announces PCIe 4.0 Switches And NVMe SSD Controller
Microsemi is starting their transition to PCIe 4.0 with updates to their Switchtec PCIe switch family and Flashtec NVMe SSD controllers. The new PCIe standard doubles the per-lane throughput...
8 by Billy Tallis on 8/3/2018SD Association Announces SD 7.0 Spec & SD Express Interface: PCIe + NVMe, Up to 985 MB/s
The SD Association - the body responsible for defining the standards for Secure Digital cards - has made it no secret that the organization has been working on a...
24 by Anton Shilov on 6/28/2018MSI’s Four-Way M.2 PCIe Card: It Looks Like a GPU
Having seen both ASUS and ASRock’s PCIe cards that support four M.2 NVMe drives each at a x4 connection at CES, and then GIGABYTE’s prototype card at Computex, there...
47 by Ian Cutress on 6/21/2018