In The Arena by TechArena - PCI-SIG’s Al Yanes on PCIe 7.0, HPC, and the Future of Interconnects

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

In this podcast, PCI-SIG President Al Yanes explores PCI-SIG's journey to PCIe 7.0, advancements in copper and optical specs, and their pivotal role in HPC and AI.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name is Alison Klein. We are bringing you stories from Supercomputing 2024 this week, and I am so delighted to be joined by Al Yanes, president of the PCI-SIG. Welcome to the program, Al. Thanks for having me, Alison. Good to be here. Al, let's just start with an introduction of you, your history in the computing industry, as well as your role as president of the PCI-SIG.

Sure. I think I've been associated with the PCI-SIG for about 30 years or so. Started with PCI-X and PCI Express and started doing technical work and technical work groups and then eventually became on the board and director and then president and chair of the board. Yeah, I've been in the industry for about 40 years now. That's amazing. And PCI, I haven't really shared this on the Tech Arena platform. I worked on PCI Express while I was at Intel in its initial days. So I'm very familiar with the PCI SIG and all of the great work that the organization does. Obviously, you've advanced the PCI Express specs quite a bit, and you've also started

taking on work on different technologies. Can you tell me where we are with the 7.0 specifications and where we're headed? Sure. 7.0 is scheduled to be released to our members next year, second half of 2025. So we're excited about that. Allison, I don't know if you're familiar, we have about a three-year cadence, the last couple of revs of the specification. about three years for innovation to happen because there's always innovation to run these interfaces much faster. So we're on a three-year cadence. We're excited. We just got an update a couple weeks ago and everything is on schedule for 2025 second half. That's amazing.

So funny to think about how PCI has continued to just advance across the industry. And at supercomputing, you guys are talking about some interesting extensions to the spec around copper and optical. Can you tell me what's new and why this is so important? Yeah. So we started an initiative a couple of years ago to standardize the specification for cabling and for specifically copper to reach the new speeds. And we wanted to have a standard approach where all of the industry can rally behind. So we announced the internal copper link specification and external copper link specification this year. And these specifications are slated to support PCI Express 5.0 and PCI Express 6.0 clock speeds. So that was pretty good. And then now we're also working on an optical solution, again, triggered by our members.

We're a volunteer organization, so we only develop specifications that our members are willing to contribute and advance. So optical seems to be a very interesting play for us. All the advantages that optical gives you, easier to achieve the faster speeds because 7.0, as you mentioned, is coming. It's a longer distance. It's less power. It has a smaller footprint for extension.

Yes, it's going to be a little bit more on the pricey side, but it fits a niche of faster performance, higher cost that folks are willing to pay for that higher performance. And simpler use, like I said, the footprint, the ability to plug a copper versus an optical cable is, the optical is a lot smaller. Sure. Now, we've been talking in the industry that copper is going to, at some point, stop in terms of its useful lifespan. And it seems like the industry keeps finding ways to push copper forward. In the conversations with those copper and optical specs,

where do you all think that copper can extend to? And what kind of data rates are we talking about for the new copper spec? For the copper specifications, they were slated for 6.0, 64 gig. Obviously, Optico can do the 128 gig. You sort of never want to bet against the copper, but we're going to have both. We're not going to pick a winner. The industry will decide and make the both win depending on your usage models. So we're just

building specifications and let the folks use them as they see fit. But hopefully the optical is here to play. You know, it's going to be not as expensive. I guess usually one of the drawbacks was optical was so expensive. So hopefully the price point will be sufficiently low that it will have the adoption that we're hoping for. Now we're at the supercomputing event, and obviously we're talking about some of the largest compute systems on the planet with the HPC community. Why are these advancements so important in particular in this

space? What we hear from our members is the need for speed, where all the AI and the machine learning and those applications, performance is king. So that's where we're trying to fit that need from our members by doubling the performance every three years, the optical solution to facilitate faster transfers between racks, between servers. So we're optimistic that our technology is going to fit those needs and up over the demand. We always sort of lag Ethernet by a couple years. So Ethernet has their new advances and we need to keep the pace with them and keep the pace with the industry. And we roll with the industry. So if the industry didn't need this performance, there wouldn't be all these member companies working on the specifications and validating

the numbers and innovating on the connectors and on the FR4 routing and that stuff. So we're just part of the industry. And the industry is asking, from what we can see, is asking for speed. Now, I think that one of the things that for folks who do not spend a lot of time thinking about I.O. and interconnects, PCIe is so foundational to so many technologies today. It's been extended into NVMe. It's been extended into CXL. It's been extended into UCIe. Obviously, with ultra-Ethernet coming on, there's thought about how PCIe needs to fit within that. How do you see this alphabet soup of technologies, and what is PCIe's role moving forward to continue to provide that foundational specification that helps guide all of these efforts?

Yeah, it's tricky. But the technologies that you mentioned, they're all complementary, sort of like cousins of the family, because they all leverage PCI Express. They've helped increase the adoption or the footprint of PCI Express and the core usages, the folks that developed the actual PCI Express cores, the folks that developed the serializers and deserializers, the PHY, the fact that they can leverage this technology across all these different platforms like storage has been a huge adoption for PCI Express because of NVMe. So they're all complimentary for us. Luckily, we're a very open organization. We follow a very open environment where we allow people to comment on our memberships

or on our specifications. We have a lot of cross-pollination with these other industry groups. It's a little bit tricky, but we tend to have a memorandum of understanding between the organizations. It's a pretty friendly industry. There's not a lot of scuffling going on. So everybody wants to do the right thing, which is provide these technologies for folks to use. When you talked about the optical and copper specs, you talked about the industry will define the adoption. How does the SIG work with industry

to ensure interoperability and compliance to the specifications as these new technologies come to market? That's a good question. One of our foundational recipes of success, as we mentioned, we've been around for 30 years, is the compliance workshops. Alliance workshops where folks can, for free, come and validate their technology with a gold standard and also with their other member companies, so interoperability. And we hold these events like four or five times a year here in the States and also in Taiwan. That really helps ensure that we're all in sync, that we're all meeting the specification. It validates the specification. It gives members feedback. We have an integrators list. So that's a key recipe of our success over the years. These free compliance integrators list, we pay someone to answer technology questions for free. Any of our members can ask any questions, something that's vague in

the specification or something that they're not familiar with. There's a free location in our website where they can ask questions. We host webinars, and you can see them on Google or YouTube, where we present any kind of tricky stuff in our specification. We host developers' conference, again, for free to our members. I think this week or next week we're in India. So we try to facilitate and evangelize our technology and ensure that the technology is solid by the interoperability. That's fantastic. And I would assume that this is so critical, given the speeds that we're operating in, you're really pushing the laws of physics in a lot of

ways, that those compliance tests are really important. Yeah, we are. And it helps that back to the three years. It takes about three years to fine-tune things because you're always fine-tuning and innovating and new ideas and leveraging what somebody else did. It's a critical piece that we do the compliance, that we do the developers conference,

and then we wait three years for a new specification. That's fantastic. One final question for you, Al. I'm sure that we've piqued our audience's interest in the technologies. Where can folks find out more about the specs that are available today, engage with the PCA SIG and learning more about the work groups that are working on the next generation specs, and then touch base with you in terms of the compliance workshops and interoperability testing opportunities that you provide. Yeah. So PCISIG.com is our website. Reach us there. We have almost about a thousand members now in our organization, which you can join. It's a common fee. There's no special tiers here in our organization.

Everybody's in the same footing. Everybody can volunteer for work groups. Everybody can join the board. We try to be as open and as equal as we can be. So folks can reach out to us from there, reach out to administration, you know, become a member or contact us. And if you are a member, you can ask technical questions or apply for a work group. That's awesome. Thank you so much, Al, for your time today. I know it's a busy week for you. It was great catching up with the PCSIG. Thanks, Alison. Thanks for having us. Thanks for joining The Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.