Items tagged with PCI Express
If you read the headline and thought "wait, what about PCIe 6?" then you must have missed when the spec was finalized back in January... of 2022. That's only three years ago, though, and it is true that PCI-SIG has been accelerating the pace of interconnect development. But why?
The simple answer is "AI". Neural...
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Odds are that every PCI Express device you have in your machine right now uses PCIe 4.0 or an older standard. We have PCIe 5.0 support in the latest desktop machines, but there are no PCIe 5.0 graphics cards yet, and while PCIe 5.0 storage is available (and fast!), it's also relatively expensive and offers little...
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When you plug in a USB or Thunderbolt cable to your computer, that connection is often being routed to a small chip that then translates that data into a PCI Express signal for the final connection to your CPU. In that case, why don't we just use PCI Express for external cabling, too, and route it directly from CPU to...
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As of right now, the fastest PCI Express protocol available on consumer motherboards is PCI Express 5.0, which offers up to 128GB/s of bi-directional x16 bandwidth. While certainly fast, PCI Express 7.0 blows the bandwidth roof off the building with a huge 4X increase to 512GB/s, with PCI-SIG releasing a full draft of...
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If you read that and thought, "PCIe 7.0? What happened to 6.0?", don't worry—PCIe 6.0 is already finalized and still on track for product launches that are likely coming next year or the year after. It's just that PCI-SIG refuses to stand still (as usual) and has now published the first draft specification for PCIe...
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The PCI standards group PCI-SIG (Special Interest Group) comprised of AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and other technology bigwigs announced it has finalized the specifications for the PCI Express 4.0 standard. It has previously announced in June at the group's DevCon event that the spec was feature complete and undergoing...
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PCI-SIG, the consortium that is in charge of developing and maintaining the PCI Express standard, announced a couple of developments this week. One is the official launch of the PCIe 4.0 specification that will take the baton from PCIe 3.0, and the other is early work on the standards eventual replacement, PCIe...
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It’s a given that SSDs have pretty much taken over the high performance and ultra-slim laptop markets, and are even making some inroads in the desktop sector. While most consumer SSDs up to this point have been SATA-based, PCI Express-based SSDs are gaining traction and significant speed increases.
When it comes to...
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Last year, Plextor introduced its M6e family of solid state drives. The drives are / were offered in M.2 and PCI Express flavors, though technically the PCIe-based models were the same M.2 drives parked in a PCIe-to-M.2 adapter card. Regardless of the technicalities involved, the Plextor M6e’s specifications and...
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We have already looked at a number of PCI Express based drives, with wide ranging price points and performance levels. Some of the drives use proprietary technologies, while others are simply SATA RAID configurations, bridged to PCI Express. Intel, however, recently released a whole new family of PCI Express solid state drives, the SSD DC...
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The pace of innovation on in the solid state storage market hasn’t slowed a bit in the last few years. Numerous manufacturers continue to release newer, faster SSDs at regular, frequent intervals. There’s been an underlining limitation, however, that’s prevented monumental leaps in performance—the aging SATA interface....
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Just before the mid-range AMD Radeon HD 7790 hit store shelves in early April, NVIDIA countered with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST. NVIDIA’s move also involved pricing changes that were good for mid-range card shoppers, but what matters most is that the card NVIDIA managed to launch coincident with the Radeon HD 7790’s launch, offers...
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Just before the mid-range AMD Radeon HD 7790 hit store shelves in early April, NVIDIA countered with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST. NVIDIA’s move also involved pricing changes that were good for mid-range card shoppers, but what matters most is that the card NVIDIA managed to launch coincident with the Radeon HD 7790’s launch, offers...
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When it comes to solid state storage, or just about any type of storage technology for that matter, there are two things you can never get enough of -- capacity and speed. SATA-based Solid State Drives offer a good balance of both currently, as NAND Flash density continues to scale, but they can't compete with...
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OCZ used the Consumer Electronics Show to unveil their latest high-end solid state drive, the Vector PCI Express. As its name suggests, the Vector PCI Express leverages the same in-house developed Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller technology used in OCZ’s excellent Vector SATA III SSD (reviewed here), but the new drive attaches to a system...
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Most of the PCIe SSD cards on the market today, with the exception of products from Fusion-io, still rely on SATA or SAS-based NAND controllers to interface on the backend of the device to the NAND array. PCIe cards from OCZ, Intel, LSI and others use controllers from LSI SandForce or the like. Fusion-io was the first company to introduce...
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We've often spoken about the future of SSD technology eventually evolving away from "bridged" interfaces like SATA and SAS, to direct-attached, native interfaces like PCI Express. It just makes sense. With the ultra-fast random access times and high IO bandwidth of solid state storage, it's not the storage media itself that's...
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Super Talent this week unveiled a new extreme solid state drive (SSD) solution that skips SATA III in favor of PCI Express. It's the new RAIDDrive upStream, a new type of SSD designed to take advantage of the greater bandwidth PCIe affords with up to 1GB/s of read performance and up to 900MB/s of write performance...
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Over the last few months, we have taken a look at a couple of OCZ-built products that leverage the company’s SuperScale Storage Accelerator with VCA (Virtualized Controller Architecture) 2.0. The first product to arrive was the RevoDrive 3 X2, which is a high-end, PCI Express SSD targeted at ultra-enthusiasts and workstation customers....
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Over the last few months, we have taken a look at a couple of OCZ-built products that leverage the company’s SuperScale Storage Accelerator with VCA (Virtualized Controller Architecture) 2.0. The first product to arrive was the RevoDrive 3 X2, which is a high-end, PCI Express SSD targeted at ultra-enthusiasts and workstation customers....
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Today, OCZ is letting fly with the second coming of a VCA 2.0 product, this time squarely targeting the enterprise, datacenter and high-end workstation markets. Where OCZ's RevoDrive line targets more consumer-like price points, their Z-Drive line is about no holds barred performance for the enterprise. The Z-Drive R4 with VCA 2.0, the same...
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A few months back, OCZ took the wraps of their RevoDrive 3 product line. The RevoDrive 3 was the first product to make use of what OCZ calls their SuperScale Storage Accelerator processor with VCA 2.0, or Virtualized Controller Architecture. In short, coupled with a quartet of SandForce SF-2200 series SSD controllers, OCZ's VCA technology...
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