PCI Express and Advanced Switching:

David Mayhew, Venkata Krishnan


Abstract

Evolutionary Path to Building Next Generation InterconnectsWith processor and memory technologies pushing the performance limit, thebottleneck is clearly shifting towards the system interconnect. Any solutionthat addresses the PCI?s bus-based interconnect, which has seriousscalability problems, must also protect the huge legacy infrastructure. PCIExpress provides such an evolutionary approach and allows a smooth migrationtowards building a highly scalable next generation interconnect. AdvancedSwitching further boosts the capabilities of PCI Express by allowing a richapplication space to be covered that includes multiprocessing andpeer-to-peer communication. Indeed, the synergy between PCI Express andAdvanced Switching permits the adoption of an evolutionary yet revolutionaryapproach for building the interconnect of the future.

Keywords:

Software Interconnects
Protocol processing hardware
Technologies for video and voice over packets
Gb/sec and Tb/sec switching and routing technologies