CCIX Technology Demo Proves 25Gbps Performance over PCIe 4.0

CCIX was just announced last year and already things are getting interesting.

The approach of CCIX as an acceleration interconnect is to work within the existing volume server infrastructure while delivering improvements in performance and cost.

We’ve reached a major milestone.  CCIX members Xilinx and Amphenol FCI have recently revealed the first public CCIX technology demo and what it means for the future of data center system design is exciting to consider.

In the demo video below, you’ll see the transferring of a data pattern at 25 Gbps between two Xilinx FPGAs, across a channel comprised of an Amphenol/FCI PCI Express CEM connector and a trace card. The two devices contain Xilinx Transceivers electrically compliant with CCIX. By using the PCI Express infrastructure found in every data center today, Xilinx can achieve this 25 Gig performance milestone. The total insertion loss in the demo is greater than 35dB, die pad to die pad, which allows flexibility in system design. Xilinx is seeing excellent margin, and a BER of less than 1E-12.

At 25 Gbps, this is the fastest data transfer between accelerators over PCI Express connections ever achieved. It’s three times faster than the top transfer speed of PCI Express Gen3 solutions available today.  The application benefits of communicating three times faster between accelerators is significant in data centers, and CCIX is designed to excel in multi-accelerator configurations.

CCIX will enable seamless system integration between processors such as X86, POWER and ARM and all accelerator types, including FPGAs, GPUs, network accelerators and storage adaptors.  Even custom ASICs can be incorporated into a CCIX topology.  And CCIX gives system designers the flexibility to choose the right combination of heterogeneous components from many different vendors to deliver optimized configurations for the data center.

We’re looking forward to the first products with CCIX sampling later this year.