A few weeks ago, we learned that Phison was pushing into the PCIe retimer and redriver market. The company is a big player in the SSD controller market, where we have reviewed a ton of drives with their controllers. We had no idea the company also made things like PCIe Gen5 retimers.
Phison PS7201 PCIe Gen5 Retimer Shown
At the show, the company showed off an example of its PCIe redrivers in the ASRock Rack GENOAD8X-2T/BCM we reviewed. That is a very cool AMD EPYC Genoa motherboard. The PCIe redrivers are more like amplifiers for the signal to help extend reach and tend to be less costly than full retimers.
While we did not catch the retimer close-up at NVIDIA GTC 2024, we have some close-up photos of the redrivers. In our review of the motherboard, we highlighted the Phison PS7101 PCIe redrivers that were featured prominently on the motherboard.
The PS7101 is actually the lower-end PCIe redriver as a dual-lane redriver. The company actually has several different options for redrivers and also retimers.
The retimer that caught our eye is the Phison PS7201. This is a PCIe Gen5 16-lane retimer that can also handle CXL 2.0.
The PS7202 is the 8-lane version, and it is pretty common to see 16 and 8-lane versions from a company.
Final Words
While this is a PCIe Gen5 part, we are starting to get into the cycle for PCIe Gen6 as those systems get ready for launch in a few quarters. For the near term, we are still going to be using PCIe Gen5 on most systems, so there is still a market for a retimer like this. It will be interesting to see where Phison makes inroads.
The PCIe retimer market has heated up over the past few years, and now chipmakers are scrambling to get solutions in the market. These days, Astera Labs is the big name in retimers, and Broadcom is trying to enter the market. Phison is offering another option.
If you want to learn more about PCIe Gen6 and CXL retimers, there is an Axautik Group LLC Research Short for the Astera Labs and Broadcom releases in Q1 2024 to answer some of the common questions STH gets asked on the topics.
$1500 to learn what a retimer actually is is just insane. Do you have any resources that are priced reasonably for the normal people?
If you check out the Astera/ Broadcom pieces linked, we have what is a retimer. The report is for those trying to compare Astera and Broadcom solutions. $1500 may seem “insane,” but we have had more folks saying we should have charged significantly more for that report, and it did not have trouble selling. Different content for a different audience.
Yes, for us peasants there is the YouTube content, where words like NEW and BIG are chronically in all caps. For lucky non-peons, the price to not have your intelligence insulted is a mere $1500.
Both the Astera and Broadcom offerings did a lot of talking up of their diagnostics and telemetry features, something that doesn’t seem to be mentioned with Phison.
Is that just not part of the article, whether for want of time or because Phison hasn’t gone into detail about it for anyone not under NDA and actively implementing the product; or is Phison simply not doing that to anything like the same degree and focusing more on being the value play(especially with the redrivers) for people who just need to make PCIe 5 work in cases where just spending more money on classier PCBs or cabling to do it passively won’t quite cut it; but not trying to handle the “advanced telemetry for fancy multi-chassis PCIe-as-interconnect-fabric” arrangements that the others appear to be eyeing?