AMD to be early adopter of PCI Express 4.0

Earlier this week, Broadcom started sampling Thor, a new 200G Ethernet controller with 50G PAM-4. This is the first Ethernet controller to use the new PCI Express 4.0 interface. Somewhat buried in the announcement is a quote from AMD datacenter design engineering vice president Raghu Nambiar, who confirms the company intends to be an early adopter of PCI Express 4.0:

“AMD intends to be an early adopter of PCIe 4.0 to meet the ever-increasing need for efficient, high-performance computing resources,” said Raghu Nambiar, vice president of datacenter design engineering at AMD. “Broadcom is a valuable contributor to the technology ecosystem and AMD looks forward to the support for our CPU and GPU processor architectures from the Thor PCIe 4.0 product.”

No further details were offered by AMD.

According to previously leaked slides, the 7nm Vega GPU for the datacenter market may be the company's first product with PCI Express 4.0 support. Next year we can probably expect Navi GPUs and Zen 2 based processors with support for the new protocol.