PCI Express switches star in San Francisco

This week in San Francisco, PLX Technology has been demonstrating its ExpressLane PCI Express PEX 8532 switch, highlighting its ability to enable high availability in a PCIe-based system.

This week in San Francisco, PLX Technology has been demonstrating its ExpressLane PCI Express PEX 8532 switch, highlighting its ability to enable high availability in a PCIe-based system.

PLX also exhibiting its entire line of ExpressLane PCIe devices at the Intel Developer Forum, including the 16-lane PEX 8516 switch and the small-form-factor PEX 8111 bridge and the high performance PEX 8114 bridge.

All four ExpressLane devices are now sampling to a large number of beta customers.

The IDF technology demonstration featured the PEX 8532 in a system using the nontransparent bridging function, thus delivering failover capabilities.

(Nontransparent bridging, which PLX introduced to PCIe through the ExpressLane family, allows the isolation of two CPU or memory domains, enabling the use of PCI Express technology in multiple-host environments and high-availability applications).

The PEX 8532 switch is connected to two independent hosts through its nontransparent bridge port.

A forced error condition on one of the hosts triggers an automatic failover to the surviving (secondary) host without interrupting the application.

"Delivering flexible switches that fully utilise the benefits of PCI Express technology can only serve to further accelerate and enable the wide deployment of PCI Express technology in markets such as high end graphics", said Ajay Bhatt, Director of PCI Express Architecture at Intel.

The PEX 8532 switching device delivers unprecedented PCI Express switching flexibility by providing up to eight completely configurable ports, on-chip nontransparency for multiprocessor designs, two virtual channels, and both peer-to-peer and fan-out capability.

The PEX 8114 PCI Express-to-PCI/PCI-X bridge is billed as the most versatile bridging device in its class, capable of forward, reverse and nontransparent bridging, and features 1Gbyte/s throughput.

PLX is among the industry's first suppliers to announce support, development efforts and actual silicon for PCI Express technology.

The company began sampling ExpressLane devices in 2004.

PLX has been developing I/O interconnect solutions since 1986.

Back to top