Microchip announces its first PCIe 5.0-based controller

The adoption of the PCIe 4.0 standard has not been especially massive and will last quite a short time. AMD has just implemented it in two generations of processors and Intel in one generation. At the end of the year we could jump to the PCIe 5.0 standard, for which the company Microchip has developed the first switches.

Microchip announces its first switches for the PCIe 5.0 standard

The PCIe 4.0 standard will go unnoticed due to its low implementation and usefulness. For the segment of graphics cards it hardly contributes, since there are hardly any differences between PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0. Yes that has been noticed in the M.2 NVMe, but those based on PCIe 4.0 are really expensive. PCIe 5.0 will implement many new features and there will be big leaps, such as doubling the bandwidth with respect to PCIe 4.0.

To our knowledge, the first processors to support PCIe 5.0 will be the Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids intended for servers. Microchip wants to position itself very well in the market for PCIe 5.0 switches and retimers.

The new Microchip switches will offer between 28 and 100 PCI Express 5.0 lanes. In addition, these new switches support up to 48 non-transparent bridges (NTB) to create a multi-host PCIe fabric using several switches.

Microchip's PCI-Express 5.0 Switchtec PFX is currently being tested by a group of selected customers. These clients have a 100-line evaluation system. It should be noted that Microchip says that these new PCIe 5.0 switches have a higher consumption than the PCIe 4.0 switches, but they have not given more information about it.

Microchip has not disclosed what the price of these new switches is, but they would be similar to the prices of PCIe 4.0 solutions. In addition, these new switches could offer a bandwidth of up to 504 Gbit / s, double that offered in PCIe 4.0 solutions.

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Source: Anandtech