Thanks for the numbers. Valuable contribution for sure!!

There's been a huge lag for PCIe adoption, and imo so so much has boiled down "do people need it"?

In the past 10 years I feel like my eyes have been opened that every high tech company's greatest highest most compelling desire is to slow walk the release out. To move as slow as the market will bear, to do as little as possible, to roll on and on with minor incremental changes.

There are canonball moments where the market is disrupted. Thank the fucking stars Intel got sick of all this shit and worked hard (with many others) to standardized NVMe, to make a post SATA world with higher speeds & better protocol. AMD64 architecture changed the game. Ryzen again. But so much of the industry is about retaining your cost advantage, is about retaining strong market segmentations, by never shipping too many PCIe lane platforms, by limiting consumer vs workstation vs server video card ram and vgpu (and mxgpu) and display out capabilities often entirely artificially.

But there is a fucking fire right now and everyone knows it. Nvlink is massively more bandwidth and massively more efficient and is essential to system performance. The need to get better fast is so on. Seems like for now SSD will keep slow walking their 2x's. But PCIe is facing a real crisis of being replaced, and everyone wants better. And hates hates hates the insane cost. PCIe 8.0 is going to be insane data to push over a differential, insane speed. But we have to.

Alas PCIe is also hampered by relatively generous broader system design. The trace distances are going to shrink, signal requirements increase a lot. But this needing a intercompatible compliance program for any peripheral to work is a significant disadvantage, versus, just make this point to point link work between these two cards.

There's so many energies happening right now in interconnect. I hope we see some actual uptake, some day. We've had so long for Gen-Z (Ethernet phy, gone now), CXL (3.x being switched, still un-arriced), now UltraEthernet and UltraLink. Man I hope we can see some step improvements. Everyone knows we are in deep shit if NV alone can connect systems. Ironically AMD's HyperTransport was open, was a path towards this, but now Infinity Fabric is an internal only thing and as branding & an idea vanishing from the world kind of, feels insufficient.

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esseph 9 days ago | parent [-]

All of these extremely high end technologies are so far away from hitting the consumer market.

Is there any desire for most people? What's the TAM?

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jauntywundrkind 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

Classic economics thinking: totally fucked "faster horses" thinking.

The addressable market depends on the advantage. Which right now: we don't know. It's all a guess that someone is going to find it valuable, and no one knows.

But if we find that we didn't actually need $700 NIC's to get shitty bandwidth, if we could have just been putting cables from PCIe shaped slot to PCIe slot (or oculink port!) and getting >>10x performance with >>10x less latency? Yeah bro uhh I think there might be a desire for using the same fucking chip we already use but getting 10x + 10x better out of it.

Faster lower latency cheaper storage? RAM expandability? Lower latency GPU access? There's so much that could make a huge difference for computing, broadly.

	▲	justincormack 9 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thunderbolt tunnels pcie and you can use it as a nic in effect with one cable between devices. Its slower than oculink but more convenient.
	▲	esseph 8 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I am very ready for optical bus lfg

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nemomarx 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Probably small consumer market of enthusiasts (notice Nvidia barely caters to gaming hardware lately) but if you can get better memory throughput on servers isn't that a large industry market?