Everyone is excited over the Raspberry Pi 5 getting explicit PCI Express (PCIe) bus capability (some Raspberry Pi 4 boards were hacked to get to internal PCIe lanes). PCIe has been in modern desktop computers for the last 20 years or so, replacing the older, incompatible PCI standard. It has undergone 7 standards revisions since introduction and also has several variants:
- PCI Express Mini Card
- Mini-SATA (mSATA)
- PCI Express M.2
A couple years ago, Maya Posch at Hackaday wrote an excellent article on PCIe and hacking it.
PCIe offers the ability to add switches which allows more than one PCIe end point (a device or part of a device) to share a PCIe link (called a ‘lane’).
This change from a parallel bus to serial links simplifies the topology a lot compared to ISA or PCI where communication time had to be shared with other PCI devices on the bus and only half-duplex operation was possible. The ability to bundle multiple lanes to provide less or more bandwidth to specific ports or devices has meant that there was no need for a specialized graphics card slot, using e.g. an x16 PCIe slot with 16 lanes. It does however mean we’re using serial links that run at many GHz and must be implemented as differential pairs to protect signal integrity.
This flexibility of PCIe has also led to PCIe lanes being routed out to strange and wonderful new places. Specifications like Intel’s Thunderbolt (now USB 4) include room for multiple lanes of PCIe 3.0, which enables fast external storage solutions as well as external video cards that work as well as internal ones.
Solid-state storage has moved over from the SATA protocol to NVMe, which essentially defines a storage device that is directly attached to the PCIe controller. This change has allowed NVMe storage devices to be installed or even directly integrated on the main logic board.
Read more in the hackaday article here and also on Wikipedia.
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