Data Movement Depends on PCIe

NVMe, CXL relying on bandwidth advances of ubiquitous bus standard

By Gary Hilson, EETimes (August 10, 2021)

The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus standard has a lot riding on it. Or perhaps more accurately, needs to accommodate a lot of data flowing through it.

Both the relatively mature Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol as well as the fledgling yet rapidly evolving Compute Express Link (CXL) are leveraging the ubiquity of PCIe, with 6.0 expected to be widely released by the end of 2021.

Mark Orthodoxou, director of Microchip Technology’s data center business unit said, the value of PCIe is its ubiquity in that it’s interoperable across CPUs, and it openness has allowed for an ecosystem to be built around it. He said the drawbacks of PCIe stem from it becoming quite complex over time, but those challenges are surmountable because there’s lots of licensable IP that can be drawn upon.

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