Chip and silicon IP outfit Rambus has announced PCIe 7.0 Switch IP with Time Division Multiplexing.
The company claims the new addition to its interconnect IP portfolio is aimed at addressing bandwidth, latency, and scalability problems in AI, cloud, and HPC systems.
As AI infrastructure gets bigger and more awkward, system designers are having to shove huge volumes of data between CPUs, GPUs, accelerators and NVMe storage.
Rambus says its PCIe 7.0 Switch IP with TDM helps by making PCIe links more flexible and efficient. The IP is meant to support disaggregated and pooled compute architectures while keeping latency low and performance deterministic.
In plain English, Rambus wants the data traffic to behave itself rather than turning into a motorway pile-up.
The company lays out a PCIe 7.0 architecture with PCIe PHY x16, PCIe 7.0 Controller and PCIe 7.0 Switch Port/TDM components.The switch IP is built on the PCIe 7.0 specification.
Rambus says it is optimised for next-generation AI and data centre SoCs that need extreme bandwidth density, advanced traffic management and scalability. By adding TDM, the switch lets designers schedule and multiplex traffic across shared links.
That should help maximise fabric utilisation across different workloads. Those workloads range from large-scale AI training to latency-sensitive inference and bog-standard data movement.
Rambus is pitching the technology at the stage of the AI boom where buying more accelerators is no longer enough. The expensive silicon still needs to talk quickly, reliably and without wasting links.
The new Switch IP expands Rambus’s PCIe 7.0 portfolio. That lineup already includes controllers, retimers, and debug tools. Rambus says the IP is designed to integrate into leading-edge ASIC platforms.
It claims the broader portfolio can help customers reduce time-to-market while meeting performance, power and reliability demands.
A PCI-SIG roadmap chart included with the announcement shows I/O bandwidth doubling every three years. That explains why the industry keeps dragging PCIe forward like a knackered but necessary mule.
The Rambus PCIe 7.0 Switch IP with TDM is meant to reinforce the company’s high-speed interface IP push. It is aimed at customers trying to solve tricky interconnect problems in AI, cloud and HPC infrastructure.
