PCI-Express Must Match The Cadence Of Compute Engines And Networks
SearchStorage, Friday, July 7,2023
When system architects sit down to design their next platforms, they start by looking at a bunch of roadmaps from suppliers of CPUs, accelerators, memory, flash, network interface cards - and PCI-Express controllers and switches. And the switches are increasingly important in system designs that have a mix of compute and memory types and for clusters that will be sharing components like accelerators and memory.
The trouble is this: The roadmaps are not really aligned well. Most CPU and GPU makers are trying to do major compute engine upgrades every two years, with architectural and process tweaks in the year in between the major launches so they have something new to sell every year. Makers of chips for networking switches and interface cards in the Ethernet and InfiniBand markets tend to be on a two-year cadence as well, and they used to tie their launches very tightly to the Intel Xeon CPU launch cadence back when that was the dominant CPU in the datacenter, but that rhythm has been broken by the constantly redrawn roadmaps from Intel, the re-emergence of AMD as a CPU supplier, and a bunch of other Arm CPU makers, including at least three hyperscalers and cloud builders.