• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.

PLX Expands PCI Express Gen3 Portfolio, Adds Versatile 96-, 80-, 64-Lane Switches

btarunr

Editor & Senior Moderator
Staff member
Joined
Oct 9, 2007
Messages
46,834 (7.63/day)
Location
Hyderabad, India
System Name RBMK-1000
Processor AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
Motherboard ASUS ROG Strix B450-E Gaming
Cooling DeepCool Gammax L240 V2
Memory 2x 8GB G.Skill Sniper X
Video Card(s) Palit GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER GameRock
Storage Western Digital Black NVMe 512GB
Display(s) BenQ 1440p 60 Hz 27-inch
Case Corsair Carbide 100R
Audio Device(s) ASUS SupremeFX S1220A
Power Supply Cooler Master MWE Gold 650W
Mouse ASUS ROG Strix Impact
Keyboard Gamdias Hermes E2
Software Windows 11 Pro
PLX Technology, Inc., a leading global supplier of high-speed connectivity solutions enabling emerging data center architectures, today announced a new trio of ultra-high lane count PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 switches developed for cutting-edge markets like storage systems, high-end graphics, and communications platforms. The high-performance ExpressLane PCIe Gen3 switches include the PEX8796 (96 lanes, 24 ports), PEX8780 (80 lanes, 20 ports) and PEX8764 (64 lanes, 16 ports), which expand the PLX portfolio to 14 PCIe Gen3 devices. Designers choosing the PEX8796 switch -- touting bandwidth of 8 Gigatransfers per second, per lane, in full duplex mode -- are rewarded with amazing throughput of 1,536 gigabits per second (192 gigabytes/s), delivering performance that challenges all other interconnect technologies.



"Designers are faced with a wide-variety of choices when it comes to high-speed system connectivity, and we firmly believe that PLX has engineered the best solutions with our PCI Express switches," said Vijay Meduri, PLX executive vice president of engineering, switching group. "With consideration for established competitive technologies like InfiniBand, SAS, and Ethernet, along with new integrated PCIe architectures from major OEMs being released, designers now have more options courtesy of PLX switches and the high-performance PCI Express standard."

New PCI Express Markets
By leveraging low latency PCIe Gen3 performance, new market opportunities are developing to help manage the massive flow of data driven mostly by today's Internet applications. Designers are creating sophisticated solid state disk (SSD) PCIe-based architectures dedicated to store and retrieve movies, music, photos, and files.

Individual racks making up the core of data centers now have a new choice when considering fabrics for external box-to-box rack connectivity. By implementing a PCIe-based ExpressFabric, architects can take advantage of native PCIe-based systems to increase performance and lower overall cost.

Other markets experiencing growth via PCIe include oil and gas exploration, Wall Street trade routing, test and measurement, communications, and general-purpose computation on graphics processing units (GPGPU) used to accelerate a wide range of applications like embedded systems, mobile appliances, computers, and gaming graphics.

PLX Product Features
An enhanced PLX multi-host architecture allows users to configure each device in legacy single-host mode or multi-host mode, which enables designers to build PCIe-based systems supporting high-availability, failover, redundant, and clustered systems. In multi-host mode, a virtual switch is created for each host port and its associated downstream ports inside the device. The traffic between the ports of such a virtual switch is completely isolated from the traffic in other virtual switches. The devices also employ a multi-clock domain, which allows the user to terminate spread spectrum clock (SSC)-enabled domains (supported on all ports), thus removing the need to pass a common clock across a backplane.

The PLX performancePAK architecture supports packet cut-through with a maximum latency of 150ns (in a x16-to-x16 configuration). This low latency, combined with large packet memory, support for a packet payload size of up to 2048 bytes, flexible common buffer/credit pool, and a non-blocking internal switch architecture, enables a full-line rate on all ports in performance-hungry applications.

PLX's unique visionPAK software provides diagnostic support, including per-port performance monitoring, capturing SerDes eye width and height, a PCIe packet generator tool, and support for error injection and loopback tests. The complementary software toolkit reduces cost by getting designs to market faster and reduces test equipment overhead.

"PCIe 3.0 adoption is proliferating, with workstation and desktop computing motherboards shipping since late 2011, followed by support from major server vendors and the emergence of PCIe 3.0-capable networking and storage I/O adapters this year," said Abhi Dugar, research manager, wired communications semiconductor research at IDC and author of Worldwide Enterprise Networks, Security Appliances, Telecommunications, and Wireless Infrastructure Semiconductor 2012-2016 Forecast. "With its broad portfolio of PCI Express-compliant switches, PLX is well positioned to take advantage of this transition to the next generation of interconnect technology."

Pricing and Availability
PEX8796, PEX8780 and PEX8764 samples are expected in Q4 2012 with full production planned for Q1 2013. Volume pricing ranges from $150.00 to $250.00. All other PLX Gen3 switches are already sampling or in full production today, with many more Gen3 devices in development.

For more information, visit this page.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 
Joined
Aug 19, 2011
Messages
529 (0.11/day)
System Name As Himself
Processor 2700X
Motherboard Asrock 370X ThaiChi
Cooling Custom Liquid
Memory 4133MHz Team
Video Card(s) Radeon VII
Storage Samsung 512 SSD's
Display(s) Asus "24 144Hz
Case Tt P5
Audio Device(s) Asus Essence One Muses/Sparkos
Power Supply EVGA 1200
Mouse RAT ProX
Keyboard Drop CTRL
Software W10 steam futuremark
sweet.....now go make me my 7990
 

Aquinus

Resident Wat-man
Joined
Jan 28, 2012
Messages
13,153 (2.88/day)
Location
Concord, NH, USA
System Name Apollo
Processor Intel Core i9 9880H
Motherboard Some proprietary Apple thing.
Memory 64GB DDR4-2667
Video Card(s) AMD Radeon Pro 5600M, 8GB HBM2
Storage 1TB Apple NVMe, 4TB External
Display(s) Laptop @ 3072x1920 + 2x LG 5k Ultrafine TB3 displays
Case MacBook Pro (16", 2019)
Audio Device(s) AirPods Pro, Sennheiser HD 380s w/ FIIO Alpen 2, or Logitech 2.1 Speakers
Power Supply 96w Power Adapter
Mouse Logitech MX Master 3
Keyboard Logitech G915, GL Clicky
Software MacOS 12.1
Might be a good time for AMD to ditch HyperTransport and just straight up use the CPU for PCI-E 3.0.
 
Top