[NEWS] PCI Express 4.0 PCI Express 4.0 Brings 16 GT/s Bandwidth Speed

The next iteration of PCI Express will double the bandwidth per lane, but that shouldn't surprise anyone. During Intel Developers Forum,we found the hidden gem in the next specification; it provides at least a 4x increase in power delivery at the slot, which might eliminate the need for auxiliary power cables with some GPUs.

Speeds and Feeds

The next iteration of the PCI Express standard will officially pass the 1-gigabyte bandwidth mark and knock on the door of 2 gigabytes per second, per lane, per direction. The performance shifts from 3.0 to 4.0 while x16 devices like video cards get a massive headroom increase that will aid in providing the bandwidth needed for next generation virtual and augmented reality. PCI Express is a full-duplex protocol that can send and transfer data at the same time. The speeds listed above are for single direction performance. PCIe 4.0 uses the same encoding scheme as PCIe 3.0.

PCI Express 4.0 Performance Usage

There are many usage cases for the New/Upcoming PCI Express 4.0. The faster 16 GT/s data Bandwidth rate and high power efficiency would be useful for the connection of the M.2, U.2 and PCIe expansion cards that would be able to take advantage of higher Bandwidth, providing higher speed and would also in turn draw less power.

PCI Express has moved well beyond video cards. Currently, nearly every IO device routes through PCIe to send signals back to the CPU.

NVMe SSDs using PCIe 3.0 x4 recently reached the usable limit of the interface, such as the Samsung SM961 that reads data at 3,100 MB/s. Enterprise NVMe SSDs using the add-in card form factor and bifurcation will ship later this year with PCIe 3.0 x16. The increase in throughput will allow manufacturers to reduce costs by delivering the same performance with half the number of PCIe lanes. Analyst firm Forward Insights predicts enterprise PCIe storage devices will surpass the number of SATA products shipped between 2017 and 2018.

Mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), and other battery-operated devices will benefit from low-power states and a new focus on burst performance. PCIe 4.0 adapts new L1 sub-states with half and quarter-swing bursts, which use just 400 and 200-millivolt steps.

During the last year, we've seen a number of companies build external graphics housings that route back to a small form factor PC via external cabling. The big fear is that a product from Company A will not work with a product from Company B. The PCI-SIG looks to end interoperability issues with the OCuLink standard.

Author : Anushk Keshri Rastogi
Source : TomsHardware

[LEAK] AMD Zen Architecture Sample Processor Benchmarks Leak !

After a much hyped wait for AMD Zen Architecture processor family, the first verified benchmarks of one of the sku's just leaked out via Ashes of Singularity benchmarks database. This leak displays the first real world performance of the new Architecture. However, the benchmarks leaked out are of the Engineering Sample of AMD Zen and may not represent  the performance of the finished product in any way. 

Benchmarks show some real improvements over AMD's FX-8350

A few days ago, the OPN (Order Part Number) of AMD’s Zen Engineering Sample leaked out. This was 1D2801A2M88E4_32/28_N. The first part of the number indicates the unique identifier of the Zen ES CPU while the second part (32/28) reveals the base clock as well as the turbo clock. This means we are looking at a base clock of 2.8 Ghz and a turbo of 3.2 Ghz. It goes without saying that the frequencies of the engineering sample are probably not final and could get an uplift by the time the product actually hits the shelf.

With this context, we continue on to the main spectacle of today. The exact flavor is the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark. We can quickly confirm that the benchmarks are indeed of a Zen processor because:

• It lists the OPN Zen has previously been identified with (1D2801A2M88E4_32/28_N), 
• It lists another OPN that we have yet to identify Zen with but appears to be a different revision of the same (2D2801A2M88E4_32/28_N) 
• So in short, we have at least two variants of Zen being tested here. I’ll refer to them as 1D and 2D. 
• We can see that the profile has previously tested Carrizo engineering samples of AMD – so this isn’t a newly minted spoofer profile. 

Here are the Benchmarks:

We can see that the Zen 1D ES sample is performing rather well. Across all 4 settings, the CPU is able to earn a consistent CPU frame-rate of 58-60 frames per second. The benchmark was conducted with the AMD Radeon RX 480, so we cannot make direct comparisons from just this benchmark alone. We can however, compare this setup to similar setups where only the CPU has been replaced.

There doesn’t seem to be any difference at first sight between the 1D and 2D variants. They are both clocked at the same rates and the only difference that we can see is the fact that the 2D variant fares much worse in terms of performance. There could be multiple reasons for why this is the case. It is possible that this particular variant is actually a cut down core and the benchmark is reading it incorrectly or even that its simply another revision being tested that did not like the AotS benchmark. In any case, because of these reasons, I decided to focus on the 1D variant for our comparison.

Author : Anushk Keshri Rastogi

Source: Click here