Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) today announced the production release of its industry-leading PCIe Gen 4.0 ExpressFabric™ switch family, comprised of PEX88000 Switches and the PEX88T32 Retimer, enabling data center and cloud ecosystem partners to address the ever-growing demand for computing and storage resources in today’s modern infrastructure. Ranging from 26 to 98 lanes and ports, the PEX88000 is the industry’s most comprehensive and flexible offering of feature-rich PCIe Gen 4.0 switches and retimer, ideal for high-throughput and low-latency applications such as deep learning, high performance computing (HPC) and NVMe all-flash arrays.

The PEX88T32 retimer is based on Broadcom’s proven PCIe Gen 4.0 SerDes IP that has been used in a wide-variety of Broadcom connectivity and storage solutions, and offers seamless integration with PCIe switches. The retimer will help strengthen the ecosystem and accelerate the deployment of PCIe Gen 4.0 especially in AI/ML/HPC applications.

“The growth of data center workloads and applications continues to scale at a rapid pace, as machine learning and data inference platforms create new ways to transfer, analyze, optimize, store and use data. The adoption of innovative, next-generation technologies is vital for the creation and sustainability of smarter, optimized data centers,” said Jas Tremblay, vice president and general manager of the Data Center Solutions Group at Broadcom. “The PEX88000 family of switches and retimer equip the ecosystem with the critical building blocks needed to scale connectivity using PCIe Gen 4.0 inside data centers, resulting in improved performance, efficiency and throughput.”

Since its initial sampling in 2018, the PEX88000 switch family has been tested extensively across the industry to design and provide higher computing performance. The PEX88000 family of switches and retimer are essential to interconnect GPGPUs, compute accelerators, CPUs, SSDs and NICs in data intensive, and latency sensitive applications. Broadcom’s PCIe Gen 4.0 ecosystem partners, including server OEMs and ODMs, drive manufacturers, cloud providers and GPGPU suppliers, leverage the PEX88000 to achieve state-of-the-art performance with data throughput up to 16 GT/s, while delivering superior power efficiency.

“As cloud providers modernize their data centers with PCIe Gen4-based infrastructure, they are looking to take advantage of NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated computing platform for their ever-increasing AI and machine learning workloads,” said Michael Diamond, senior director of Strategic Partnerships at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is working closely with Broadcom to ensure our customers can benefit from the increased bandwidth and device connectivity that PCIe Gen4 provides.”

Availability

The PEX88000 has been released for mass production. Please contact your local Broadcom sales representative for samples and pricing.

Further information on the PEX88000 can be found online https://www.broadcom.com/products/pcie-switches-bridges/expressfabric/gen4