Microchip launched world’s first PCIe 5.0 switch chip, can be used for data analysis

As per the news, American chip producer Microchip today launched the world’s first PCIe 5.0 switch chip: Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 series.

The latest 5.0 protocol is twice the speed of PCIe 4.0, and the official stated it can be used for data analysis, autonomous driving, medical diagnosis, device learning, and other purposes.

Comes with this chip can also further enhance the extreme speed of high-speed network cards and NVMe solid-state drives. currently, Microchip is the only manufacturer in the world that has both PCIe Gen 5 switch chip and PCIe Gen 5 timer.

These chips are used to split PCIe channels or to ensure signal stability when the device is far from the CPU and the motherboard wiring is too long. According to Andrew Dieckmann, vice president of the company’s business units and application engineering.

Dedicated accelerators, graphics cards, CPUs, and high-speed network cards put forward higher requirements for PCIe interfaces. This chip doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 to 32GT/s to ensure the speed requirements of the next-generation device learning platform.

The Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 switching chip can expand the number of channels from 28 to 100 and supports up to 48 NTB (non-transparent bridges), which can be composed of multiple chips. The PCIe 5.0 specification was proposed in 2019, and there are rumors that Intel’s 12th-generation Alder Lake processors will support PCIe 5.0 channels.

The processor code-named Alder Lake-P can contain up to 14 cores and is designed with a combination of large and small cores. Additionally, Intel’s 12th generation processors will also support DDR5 memory.

(Source)