PCIe 5.0

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 like a very straightforward update to their existing Switchtec PFX switches for PCIe 4.0, carrying over all the important features but doubling the speed. The final version of the PCI Express 5.0 specification was released in May 2019, but significant adoption is not expected to begin until Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors ship, planned for later this year. Microchip is positioning themselves to be one of the most important vendors helping enable the transition, and they expect to be the only company offering both switches and retimers for PCIe 5.0. Components like switches and retimers are...