A small theme at the FMS 2024 show was putting PCIe over optics. We previously showed the Kioxia Optical Interface SSD Demo. The other big one that we captured was at the Microchip booth as a Microchip – Amphenol – GigaIO demo.
Microchip PCIe Gen5 x16 over QSFP56-DD Optical Demo Shown
Here is the little demo at the Microchip booth. We can see the full setup running over optics here.
Here is thee test board showing cabled copper connections.
Here is the Serial Cables box with the QSFP56-DD connections on one side. Serial Cables is this cool little company that makes many of the test fixtures you see in the industry.
Here is a fun one. A little desktop fan was being used to cool the QSFP56-DD cages behind the demo.
Here is the other end of that.
While you can see the Supermicro workstation behind the monitor, rumor has it there was an AIC JBOX that we reviewed with a bunch of devices running underneath the table. George did not grab pictures of this.
Final Words
For a company like GigaIO, the idea of extending the reach of its PCIe-switched fabric beyond that of copper DACs is very useful, especially as CPU head nodes and different types of accelerators require different cooling. Looking a step further, this was not a CXL demo, but with CXL 3.1, built atop the PCIe Gen6 physical layer, we have a domain space of 4096 endpoints. That is, more than many racks will be able to support this, and that may end up being another great use case for this type of technology down the road.
Right now, this is a demo of the technology by Microchip. Given we saw it using Serial Cables fixtures, it was likely more of a technology demo than something meant to be deployed as-is today. At the same time, it is one that we can see being more important in the coming years so it felt worth showing off.
