Comment by tripdout
15 hours ago
Very cool. Seeing how almost everything from WiFi, to NVME SSDs, (to apparently USB ports sometimes?) are connected to it, is PCIe the only high-speed interconnect we have for peripherals to communicate with modern CPUs?
The high speed signals that come out of mainstream CPU chips are generally DDR, SMP, and PCIe. Outside of a very few exotic things that use QPI or HT to connect, or exotic storage might use DDR, yes high speed off-chip peripherals use PCIe.
NVLink is another one you might have heard of, although it might also fall in the exotic category. I think some systems take AXI off-chip too. So there's various other weird and wonderful things. But none you're likely to have in your PC I think.
On-chip is another story, you can connect USB or NVMe or GPU "peripherals" using an on-chip interconnect type. But I guess you are asking about off-chip.
USB4 needs PCIe because its Thunderbolt part has PCIe tunneling.
> PCIe the only high-speed interconnect we have for peripherals to communicate with modern CPUs?
In a pedantic/technical sense, no. Practically speaking though, yes.