Comment by nuand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nuand | Hacker News Reader

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Take a look at slides 9 through 15 of this presentation: https://pcisig.com/sites/default/files/files/PCI_Express_Ele...

PCIe signals are generated by transceivers -- devices within chips that are specialized in signal conditioning e.g echo cancelling, emphasis/de-emphasis, dynamic impedance matching. These transceivers and the analog and digital techniques they implement get better with time. This is easily measurable by looking at the Bit Error Rate of data or by looking at eye diagrams (see slide 15). As data rates increase things like drive strengths, impedance mismatches, and a number of other properties of silicon will "close the eye" meaning the transmitted "0"s and "1"s are not different enough for them to be distinguished by a receiver enough of the time to successfully decode a packet. (PCIe is packet based, it's surprisingly somewhat similar to Ethernet). But essentially as our understanding and processes for manufacturing semiconductor devices increase, we're able to "open the eye" more, at which point the industry decides to increase data rates.

The TL;DR is that there's no silver bullet but lots of lead bullets. The big gains in PCIe from generation to generation are the result of accumulating lots of smaller gains in other places.

It helps that this isn't happening just for PCIe; there's lots of breakthroughs that benefit (and may have originated with) other high speed links.

Would these problems persist if we switched to optical signaling instead of rf? Can we expect an optical PCIe equivalent one day?

The nature of problems is different, but fundamentally the two questions of "how to distinguish between 1 and 0 in the presence of noise" and "can the reciever and transmitter change state fast enough" apply.

Optical PCIe would be hugely handicapped by lack of a standard optical PCB construction method. You'd have to print waveguides onto the PCB. And then it stops working if you get dust in the socket.

No mostly because the wavelength of light is large, and therefore has poor information density compared to electrons.

I doubt this be true as HF is also modulated onto wire ... it's not the electron per se which wander but modulated HF. Sure, the carrying device is the electron buts it's not like a stream of water

Basically in the optical regime it won't be possible to propagate the E field in a conduit smaller than the wavelength. This is because a small conduit doesn't have the right boundary conditions to support fields (like trying to fit waves into a didgeridoo). So you're always going to have these massive, massive 1um structures compare to state-of-the-art nm scale semiconductors.

There are advantages of optics including that light moves faster than electrons (important for HPC where the figure of merit is latency in us between nodes, etc) and typically has higher fidelity. But the size of these structures is orders of magnitude larger than conventional semiconductors.

Eventually yes, we can expect to see optical in desktops. Fiber connections are "better" but also much more expensive. The price should eventually come down as volumes increase. The main delaying factor is that copper is still good enough.

Multimedia is the driving force behind increased data usage, and I think we'll continue to need more throughput until we no longer get any benefits from higher resolutions (aka when we have substantially more pixels than rods and cones in our eyes). At the moment a phone with a 4K display saturates your eyes at any distance greater than 2 feet from your face. I think a 16x PCIe 4.0 link will likely provide more than enough bandwidth to generate fully immersive VR experiences, so the question then becomes... why and when will we need optical PCIe 5.0 to quadruple the datarate of PCIe 4.0...

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