Astera Labs, a relatively unknown semiconductor company with a market value of $10 billion, recently showed off its new Aries 6 PCIe retimer board, which it is now testing with leading AI and cloud infrastructure providers.
Due to the fast data transfer within the PCIe interface, signals can deteriorate, especially over longer distances or due to interference. A PCIe retimer helps maintain the integrity of the data signal over the PCIe interface by cleaning, reshaping, and retransmitting the data signals.
The Aries 6 retimers, the first in Astera Labs’ PCIe 6.x portfolio, provide robust, power-efficient and efficient PCIe 6.x and CXL 3.x connectivity, fully focused on meeting next-generation networking requirements GPUs. accelerators, CPUs and CXL memory controllers.
3x the range
Based on Intel’s Retimer Supplemental Specification, the new Aries 6 retimers build on the company’s widespread PCIe 5.0 retimer portfolio and reportedly increase range distance by three times the standard rate.
Casey Morrison, Chief Product Officer of Astera Labs, said: “The superior bandwidth of PCIe 6.x technology is required to handle data-intensive workloads and to maximize the use of AI accelerators, but the faster speeds introduce new signal integrity issues on hyperscale platforms. Aries Smart DSP Retimers have set the gold standard for addressing critical PCIe/CXL connectivity challenges with a solid track record of robust performance and seamless interoperability. We are proud that our third generation Aries Retimers with support for PCIe 6.x, PCIe 5.x and CXL 3.x have now been sampled from leading AI and cloud platform providers.”
ServeTheHome took a first look at Astera Labs’ new portfolio on Nvidia GTC 2024 (see the photo above) and noted that the “Aries 6 was paired with PCIe Gen6 x16 speeds at 10-11W power consumption. That’s a big problem, because it is lower than Broadcom claims with its new retimers.”
Many major AI companies are excited about the upcoming arrival of the new generation of Aries Smart DSP Retimers from Astera Labs. Raghu Nambiar, Corporate Vice President, Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions, AMD, said: “Our close collaboration with Astera Labs on PCIe technologies ensures that our customers’ platforms continue to meet the higher bandwidth connectivity requirements of the next generation of AI and HPC workloads.” while Brian Kelleher, Senior Vice President of GPU Engineering, Nvidia, added: “The new Aries Smart DSP Retimers from Astera Labs with support for PCIe 6.2 will help enable higher bandwidth to optimize the utilization of our next generation computing platforms. “