PCIe

The PCI-Express interconnect standard may be going through some major changes in the coming years, based on a new announcement from the group responsible for the standard. The PCI-SIG is announcing this morning the formation of a PCIe Optical Workgroup, whose remit will be to work on enabling PCIe over optical interfaces. And while the group is still in its earliest of stages, the ramifications for the traditionally copper-bound standard could prove significant, as optical technology would bypass some increasingly stubborn limitations of copper signaling that traditional PCIe is soon approaching. First released in the year 2000, PCI-Express was initially developed around the use of high-density edge connectors, which are still in use to this day. The PCIe Card Electromechanical specification (CEM) defines the PCIe...

Cadence Buys Memory and SerDes PHY Assets from Rambus

In a surprising turn of events, Cadence and Rambus entered into a definitive agreement late last week for Cadence to buy memory physical interface IP and SerDes businesses from...

5 by Anton Shilov on 7/24/2023

PCI Express 7.0 Spec Hits Draft 0.3, 512GBps Connectivity on Track For 2025 Release

In what’s quickly becoming a very busy week for data center and high-performance computing news, the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) is hosting its annual developers conference over in...

5 by Ryan Smith on 6/13/2023

PCI Express 6.0 Specification Finalized: x16 Slots to Reach 128GBps

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...

77 by Ryan Smith on 1/11/2022

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 7/2/2021

Microchip 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 2/3/2021

Microchip’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 6/1/2020

Intel 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 5/12/2020

PCIe 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 2/21/2020

Rambus 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 11/13/2019

PCIe 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 10/15/2019

The 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 10/7/2019

Gen-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 10/4/2019

PCI 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 6/18/2019

Spotted 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 6/5/2019

PCI-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 5/29/2019

GIGABYTE 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 5/29/2019

AI 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 4/10/2019

OSS 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 3/22/2019

Hot 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 8/21/2018

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now