Wednesday, August 2nd 2023
PCI-SIG Exploring an Optical Interconnect to Enable Higher PCIe Technology Performance
PCI-SIG today announced the formation of a new workgroup to deliver PCI Express (PCIe) technology over optical connections. The PCI-SIG Optical Workgroup intends to be optical technology-agnostic, supporting a wide range of optical technologies, while potentially developing technology-specific form factors.
"Optical connections will be an important advancement for PCIe architecture as they will allow for higher performance, lower power consumption, extended reach and reduced latency," said Nathan Brookwood, Research Fellow at Insight 64. "Many data-demanding markets and applications such as Cloud and Quantum Computing, Hyperscale Data Centers and High-Performance Computing will benefit from PCIe architecture leveraging optical connections."
"We have seen strong interest from the industry to broaden the reach of the established, multi-generational and power-efficient PCIe technology standard by enabling optical connections between applications," said PCI-SIG President and Chairperson Al Yanes. "PCI-SIG welcomes input from the industry and invites all PCI-SIG members to join the Optical Workgroup, share their expertise and help set specific workgroup goals and requirements."
Existing PCI-SIG workgroups will continue their generational march towards a 128GT/s data rate in the PCIe 7.0 specification, while this new optical workgroup will work to make the PCIe architecture more optical-friendly.
Source:
PCI-SIG
"Optical connections will be an important advancement for PCIe architecture as they will allow for higher performance, lower power consumption, extended reach and reduced latency," said Nathan Brookwood, Research Fellow at Insight 64. "Many data-demanding markets and applications such as Cloud and Quantum Computing, Hyperscale Data Centers and High-Performance Computing will benefit from PCIe architecture leveraging optical connections."
Existing PCI-SIG workgroups will continue their generational march towards a 128GT/s data rate in the PCIe 7.0 specification, while this new optical workgroup will work to make the PCIe architecture more optical-friendly.
32 Comments on PCI-SIG Exploring an Optical Interconnect to Enable Higher PCIe Technology Performance
You'll still have issues with long range wifi, but with reasonable distance I wonder how it changes things. Wifi has already improved a lot on it's own as well, but if you could further improve it with a helping helping of optical interconnect it would be fantastic.
If you have a computer whose circuit breakers are larger than an average home PC, that is.
With a pure PCIe connection, such as occulink, for example, you need not worry about any of the overhead associated with thunderbolt… you just have a pipe to the PCIe bus. Also, not all motherboard’s have an onboard thunderbolt controller, and those that do cost extra. It would be nice to have an external PCIe ecosystem that isn’t necessarily based on thunderbolt/usb4.
We shall see what happens. Hopefully the next Ridge from Intel, Barlow Ridge, has less bugs in the firmware, because Maple Ridge has been terrible. Titan Ridge was a good generation from Intel.