Comment by throwaway132448
5 hours ago
Tangential question: PCIe is a pretty future-proof technology to learn/invest in, right? As in, it is very unlikely to become obsolete in the next 5-10 years (like USB)?
5 hours ago
Tangential question: PCIe is a pretty future-proof technology to learn/invest in, right? As in, it is very unlikely to become obsolete in the next 5-10 years (like USB)?
PCIe is probably the most future proof technology we have right now. Even if it is upheaveled at the hardware level, from the software perspective it just exposes a device's arbitrary registers to some memory mapped location. Software drivers for PCIe devices will continue to work the same.
Neither of those is going to be obsolete in 5 years. Might get rebadged and a bunch of extensions, but there's such a huge install base that rapid change is unlikely. Neither Firewire nor Thunderbolt unseated USB.
USB4 is the ~third USB protocol stack though (USB1/2 being basically the same iirc, USB3 being a completely separate protocol that neither logically nor physically interacts with USB1/2 at all), heavily based on Thunderbolt to the point of backwards compatibility.
USB4 is essentially thunderbolt with some new features and some features being optional instead of mandatory.
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Might as well be replaced by optical connectors next years, but who knows in advance. Currently there is no competition
Hmm. What's the current maths on distance vs edge rate vs transceiver latency vs power consumption on when that would be a benefit? Not to mention how much of a pain it is to have good optical connectors.
I wouldn't expect that to be mainstream until after optical networking becomes more common, and for consumer hardware that's very rare (apart from their modem).
even though it would be optical, it still is using PCIe protocols in the background...
PCIe is still using PCI protocol just over serdes
How could you possibly know exactly what protocol they'd be using for the potential future optical PCIe connection? Your guess is as good as anyone's, no?
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Curious what you mean by learning? Learning about TLPs? Learning about FPGA DMA Engines like XDMA? Learning about PCIe switches / retimers? Learning about `lspci`?
Nothing specific! I learned how to implement USB(-C) because there was some specific hardware I wanted to create. I could see the same thing happening with PCIe in future. With USB its longevity was fairly obvious to me, with PCIe I’m not well informed. Thanks for giving me some acronyms to explore!
As much as I cringe sharing linkedin articles, this particular series of posts are pretty good: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pci-express-primer-1-overview...