Life In The Quick Lane
Whereas we haven’t even seen PCIe 6.0, the PCI SIG consortium have been busily drafting up PCIe 7.0 and right now they launched our first take a look at what it is going to be able to. The brand new spec is unlikely to herald the arrival of insanely quick GPUs, even the present generations of playing cards have greater than sufficient bandwidth on a PCIe 4.0 16x slot. It’d provide an fascinating problem to Phison and different SSD controller makers, who’re busily saturating PCIe 5.0 connections however the actual driver for the brand new spec is networking.
The PCIe 6.0 specs describe a theoretical most bidirectional bandwidth of of 256GB/s from a 16x slot, which is definitely spectacular however not sufficient to feed the rising LLM trade. A PCIe 6.0 16x slot can solely help a single 800Gb/s NIC, which isn’t sufficient to fulfill the wants a big machine studying clusters and has led to Intel, NVIDIA and others adopting their very own options. A PCIe 7.0 16x slot would provide double that theoretical bandwidth, and 512GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth and meaning we’d breach the terabyte barrier with playing cards able to 1.6Tb/s. That isn’t fairly sufficient to match Nvidia’s NVLink or AMD’s Infinity Material interconnects but it surely ought to preserve PCIe viable for ‘slower’ options
That enhance in bandwidth may also permit Compute Specific Hyperlink to carry out some fascinating new methods, The Register factors out that this can make PCIe hooked up RAM way more possible. Take a look at how that might work and the possible usage for it here.
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