t e c h i e - t a l k s ::: technology at its best

The reign of the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slots is almost over. Not too long ago, a new standard of I/O had emerged, boasting greater scalability and performance, far superior than the former, which then overturned the tables and became the standard I/O technology on every personal computers today. The long 9 years of being a “de facto” standard graphics I/O technology, is now slowly going into the history books. It was only last year that the next generation PCI-e slots have replaced almost every motherboards that are being produced today.

In these coming months, the people who had brought us the PCI-E technology is looking into a revised version of the PCI-E. The new PCI-E 2.0 will see a boost in the current data transfer bandwidth from 8Gb/s (4Gb/s in and 4Gb/s out) to double the speed! (i.e a total of 16Gb/s which means 8Gb/s in and 8Gb/s out) The higher bandwidth will allow product designers to implement narrower interconnect links to achieve high performance while reducing cost. This is very forward looking as much of today’s hardwares are hungrier for more bandwidth. Hence, this is one of the best times to release a revised version of the PCI-E.

A number of optimizations and improvements have been made to the protocol and software layers of the PCI Express architecture in the PCI Express Base 2.0 specification. These include:

• Dynamic link speed management – to control the speed at which the link is operating
• Link bandwidth notification – to notify software (operating system, device drivers, etc) of changes in link speed and width
• Capability structure expansion – to expand the control registers to better manage devices, slots and the interconnect
• Access control services – optional controls to manage peer-peer transactions
• Completion timeout control – to define a required disable mechanism plus related optional enhancements
• Function-level reset – optional mechanism to reset functions within a device
• Power limit redefinition – to redefine slot power limit values to accommodate devices that consume higher power

If you had just bought a new roaring fast PCI-E graphics card, don’t just fret yet. The good news is that the new PCI Express 2.0 will be backward compatible. Thus, you can still re-use your new graphics card with a new PCI-E 2.0 equipped motherboard, without any speed increase. The board will have a feature that automatically adjusts the lane speeds to match the PCI-E version that your graphic card supports.

Neither NVIDIA nor ATI have announced support for the new standard yet. However, the products that supports the new technology should arrive no sooner than 2^nd quater this year when the motherboards carrying this technology arrives to the market.