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jauntywundrkind08/09/20251 replyview on HN

Thanks for the numbers. Valuable contribution for sure!!

There's been a huge lag for PCIe adoption, and imo so so much has boiled down "do people need it"?

In the past 10 years I feel like my eyes have been opened that every high tech company's greatest highest most compelling desire is to slow walk the release out. To move as slow as the market will bear, to do as little as possible, to roll on and on with minor incremental changes.

There are canonball moments where the market is disrupted. Thank the fucking stars Intel got sick of all this shit and worked hard (with many others) to standardized NVMe, to make a post SATA world with higher speeds & better protocol. AMD64 architecture changed the game. Ryzen again. But so much of the industry is about retaining your cost advantage, is about retaining strong market segmentations, by never shipping too many PCIe lane platforms, by limiting consumer vs workstation vs server video card ram and vgpu (and mxgpu) and display out capabilities often entirely artificially.

But there is a fucking fire right now and everyone knows it. Nvlink is massively more bandwidth and massively more efficient and is essential to system performance. The need to get better fast is so on. Seems like for now SSD will keep slow walking their 2x's. But PCIe is facing a real crisis of being replaced, and everyone wants better. And hates hates hates the insane cost. PCIe 8.0 is going to be insane data to push over a differential, insane speed. But we have to.

Alas PCIe is also hampered by relatively generous broader system design. The trace distances are going to shrink, signal requirements increase a lot. But this needing a intercompatible compliance program for any peripheral to work is a significant disadvantage, versus, just make this point to point link work between these two cards.

There's so many energies happening right now in interconnect. I hope we see some actual uptake, some day. We've had so long for Gen-Z (Ethernet phy, gone now), CXL (3.x being switched, still un-arriced), now UltraEthernet and UltraLink. Man I hope we can see some step improvements. Everyone knows we are in deep shit if NV alone can connect systems. Ironically AMD's HyperTransport was open, was a path towards this, but now Infinity Fabric is an internal only thing and as branding & an idea vanishing from the world kind of, feels insufficient.


Replies

esseph08/09/2025

All of these extremely high end technologies are so far away from hitting the consumer market.

Is there any desire for most people? What's the TAM?

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