With the rise of GPU-compute, a lot of the supercomputers are playing around with faster I/O systems. IBM pushed OpenCAPI / NVLink with Nvidia, and I think that inspired the PCIe ecosystem to innovate.
PCIe standards are including more and more coherent-memory options. It seems like PCIe is trying to become more like Infinity Fabric (AMD) / UltraPath Interconnect (Intel).
One bus to rule them all! Would make some sense and if it's fast enough, not saying we will see memory in PCIe form factor, though, size of memory progression, maybe down the line it may go that way.
> It seems like PCIe is trying to become more like Infinity Fabric (AMD) / UltraPath Interconnect (Intel).
So far CXL is pretty strictly a leader/follower type approach, not really suitable for a more symmetric relationship like you have in a multi-socket system. But maybe one day..
With sufficiently fast memory bandwidth, does dedicated GPU memory become irrelevant? AFAIK discrete graphics on laptops still share the main memory, but at what point does that become a standard setup on desktops too?
If anything, the higher-bandwidths of future PCIe-specs would allow the CPU to access the dedicated GPU VRAM at its full speed, rather than PCIe-limited speeds.
PCIe standards are including more and more coherent-memory options. It seems like PCIe is trying to become more like Infinity Fabric (AMD) / UltraPath Interconnect (Intel).