PCIe 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 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...
CES 2021: OWC Introduces 3.5" U.2 SSD Carrier
OWC is introducing the U2 Shuttle, a novel carrier module that packs four M.2 NVMe SSDs into a 3.5" U.2 form factor. The U2 Shuttle includes a PCIe switch...
5 by Billy Tallis on 1/14/2021Scaling Inference with NVIDIA’s T4: A Supermicro Solution with 320 PCIe Lanes
When visiting the Supercomputing conference this year, there were plenty of big GPU systems on display for machine learning. A large number were geared towards the heavy duty cards...
12 by Ian Cutress on 11/19/2018HighPoint Releases the SSD7102: A Bootable Quad M.2 PCIe x16 NVMe SSD RAID Card
In the upper echelons of commercial workhouses, having access to copious amounts of local NVMe storage is more of a requirement than ‘something nice to have’. We’ve seen solutions...
28 by Ian Cutress on 10/24/2018Microsemi 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 8/3/2018ASMedia Preps ASM2824 PCIe 3.0 Switch
Back in 2016 Avago/Broadcom greatly increased the prices of its PLX-branded PCIe switches, which caused many motherboard manufacturers to cease using them. Avago’s motivation was rather obvious — PCIe...
20 by Anton Shilov on 6/27/2018Avago Announces PLX PEX9700 Series PCIe Switches: Focusing on Data Center and Racks
One of the benefits of PCIe switches is that they are designed to be essentially transparent. In the consumer space, I would wager that 99% of the users do...
12 by Ian Cutress on 5/12/2015