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Nubis Communications and Alphawave Semi Showcase First Demonstration of Optical PCI Express 6.0 Technology

AleksandarK

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Nubis Communications, Inc., provider of low-latency high-density optical inter-connect (HDI/O), and Alphawave Semi (LN: AWE), a global leader in high-speed connectivity and compute silicon for the world's technology infrastructure, today announced their upcoming demonstration of PCI Express 6.0 technology driving over an optical link at 64GT/s per lane. Data Center providers are exploring the use of PCIe over Optics to greatly expand the reach and flexibility of the interconnect for memory, CPUs, GPUs, and custom silicon accelerators to enable more scalable and energy-efficient clusters for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML/AI) architectures.

Nubis Communications and Alphawave Semi will be showing a live demonstration in the Tektronix booth at DesignCon, the leading conference for advanced chip, board, and system design technologies. An Alphawave Semi PCIe Subsystem with PiCORE Controller IP and PipeCORE PHY will directly drive and receive PCIe 6.0 traffic through a Nubis XT1600 linear optical engine to demonstrate a PCIe 6.0 optical link at 64GT/s per fiber, with optical output waveform measured on a Tektronix sampling scope with a high-speed optical probe.




Optical transmission technology can be leveraged to greatly extend link distances at the same bandwidths compared with copper cables, supporting the larger cluster sizes needed to support ever-larger AI/ML servers distributed over multiple nodes, and enabling innovation in new disaggregated network architectures. The Nubis XT1600 optical engine supports up to 16 lanes of high-density PCIe Gen 6.0 or 100 Gbps/lane Ethernet optical connectivity without incorporating retimers.

"Our high level of integration with 16 lanes full-duplex in a single low-power, low-latency optical engine is a great match to the maximum bandwidth of PCIe x16 for next-generation compute and storage deployments," said Scott Schube, VP of Marketing at Nubis Communications. "Our demonstration of the Nubis XT1600 linear optical engine and Alphawave Semi's PCIe 6.0 Controller and PHY IP showcases the viability of a PCIe 6.0 x8 link over optical fiber at 64 GT/s."

"AI applications are reshaping data center networks, with hyperscalers deploying increasingly large clusters of disaggregated servers distributed over longer distances. This shift has generated heightened interest in PCIe over Optics among several of our customers," said Tony Chan Carusone, CTO at Alphawave Semi. "Through our collaboration with Nubis, we're pleased to demonstrate how we're leveraging Alphawave Semi's leadership in connectivity IP and silicon to enable PCIe optical connectivity solutions that accelerate high-performance AI computing and data infrastructure."

Availability

The Nubis XT1600 linear optical engine is available now for sampling, please contact via nubis-inc.com.

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Looking forward to next gen SSD with a seperate AIO loop to facilitate 10% extra boost speeds...
 
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Looking forward to next gen SSD with a seperate AIO loop to facilitate 10% extra boost speeds...

I'm thinking we are rapidly getting to the point where the faster SSDs will only exist in professional form factors such as U.2 for workstations or servers where this isn't an issue. And really that's fine. As there isn't much of a reason to use them in the laptops people use for most work even most creative work, on the "stuff you do that doesn't count" there isn't a use for them in gaming either.

A lot of the speed chasing with SSDs in non professional functions reminds me of back in the day when people were slapping dedicated hardware RAID cards and SCSI drives into computers where it just wasn't needed. Sure it's cool and all but it's also kinda stupid.
 
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I'm thinking we are rapidly getting to the point where the faster SSDs will only exist in professional form factors such as U.2 for workstations or servers where this isn't an issue. And really that's fine. As there isn't much of a reason to use them in the laptops people use for most work even most creative work, on the "stuff you do that doesn't count" there isn't a use for them in gaming either.

A lot of the speed chasing with SSDs in non professional functions reminds me of back in the day when people were slapping dedicated hardware RAID cards and SCSI drives into computers where it just wasn't needed. Sure it's cool and all but it's also kinda stupid.
There was a noticeable difference in performance in desktop pcs with raid 0 configurations
i Think you have forgotten how long everything took back in say 2003
 
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Please tell me that they have used, or are building upon, the existing "optical" cable tech & the lessons learned therein to get this speedy interface inside our computers WITHOUT a massive cost :D

Yea I know I'm probably dreaming, but just sayin....
 
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There was a noticeable difference in performance in desktop pcs with raid 0 configurations
i Think you have forgotten how long everything took back in say 2003

SCSI drives with their ribbon cables and using actual RAID cards predates 2003 by a good bit ;)

In the SATA era some people did RAID those drives or even those Raptor drives with onboard RAID, but you still had crazies who bought RAID cards and SAS drives.

The onboard is understandable as were the Raptors but going the SCSI and SAS route with dedicated hardware for it was always silly.
 
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