PCI-SIG, the consortium responsible for setting the PCIe standard for the industry, recently unveiled the specifications for CopprLink. The interface is set to be the next generation of cabling based on the current interface and will lay the groundwork for PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0.
“CopprLink cables will evolve with the same form factors for future bandwidth generations and bring PCIe cabling into the future. Many next-generation, latency-sensitive applications will benefit from PCIe CopprLink cables, including data center servers, storage, networking, accelerators and more.”
PCI-SIG will introduce both Internal and External Cable specifications for CopprLink. The Internal cable will include an SNIA SFF-TA-1016 form factor, with a maximum of one metre reach within a single system. Applications for this cable include motherboard-to-add-in-card, motherboard-to-backplane, chip-to-chip, and add-in-card-to-backplane. Basically, the target applications include storage and data centre compute nodes.
The External CopprLink cable will support a SNIA SFF-TA-1032 connector and will have two metres of reach to facilitate rack-to-rack connections. Some example of implementations include CPU-to-storage, CPU-to-memory, CPU-to-accelerator, and accelerator fabrics in disaggregated server platform nodes. Target applications for the cable include storage and datacentre for AI and Machine Learning (ML) use cases.
(Source: PCI-SIG, Videocardz)
