Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Yes, It’s Real: PCI Express x32”.
Your PC probably has a slot that looks like this. It’S a PCI Express x16 slot and it’s commonly used for graphics cards as it’s one of the fastest connections on your motherboard. Even the chunkiest, most powerful gpus can be handled by a single one of these slots. No problem, but there is another, did you know that PCI Express X32 is a real thing that actually exists? What the heck would you do with a slot? That’S twice as long well to be clear, it’s very difficult to find slots physically bigger than that standard x16 size.
Remember that those numbers when we’re talking about PCI Express refer to the number of lanes, not necessarily the physical size of the slot. A tiny, m.2 SSD often uses four PCI Express Lanes, even though the connector is quite a bit smaller than a regular pcie X4 sized slot. How exactly does PCI Express X32 work, then it turns out that the PCI Express standard doesn’t support a single link greater than x16. The reason for this is because it’s very difficult to actually Implement links this wide in Hardware. You see when you send data down a PCI Express link, say to a graphics card, that data is striped across multiple lanes and doing this is not trivial.
When the data arrives, wherever it’s going, it has to be Des skewed, meaning synchronized, although PCI Express, is a Serial interface that doesn’t require the data on each lane to to arrive at exactly the same time. Synchronizing the data still involves Hardware overhead and once you start getting past 16 Lanes, it’s just too much to keep up with. So instead of having one big slot, these higher PCI Express connections use a trick called driver binding. Essentially, this allows multiple pcie devices to talk to each other and coordinate their traffic, so they can act as one big device. So a pcie X32 link is actually two x16 links mashed together in software with the devices installed in two normal x16 slots. The performance overhead involved with driver binding for X32 isn’t too bad.
But if you were to theoretically go up to say x64 you’d likely need more Hardware, as at that point you just have too many transactions for your poor system to handle, but wait a sec. Why the heck? Would you need that much bandwidth? To begin with, we’ll tell you right after we thank MSI for sponsoring today’s video, the MSI MPG Gung near near 300r. Airflow case has everything you need for a slick setup, we’re talking a perforated front panel, support for dual 360 mil AIO liquid coolers and an omnidirectional GPU stand, so your build can stand out, plus those pre-installed argb fans will make your rig look straight up. Epic. You can take that to the bank check out the MSI MPG Gung 300r airflow in the description below now. The appeal of having this many PCI Express Lanes isn’t so you can do something like squeeze more performance out of your graphics card.
Even an RTX 490 barely improves going from eight Lanes to 16 Lanes on a pcie 4.0 slot. Instead, driver binding is used in applications where all the bandwidth you can get is appealing. You often see X32 links in certain kinds of networking cards, mostly for server and data center use. Although Nvidia is obviously known more for gpus and AI, they make a line of network adapters that supports both ethernet and another high-speed networking protocol called infiniband this product. For example, goes into a standard PCI Express x16 slot, but it comes with a second auxiliary card with the same connector. They work in tandem to provide an X32 connection for extra bandwidth in case you’re, using a previous revision of PCI Express that doesn’t provide enough bandwidth to take full advantage of the network.
Adapter speed there’s also a special cable connecting them to allow them to share data, while taking some of the pressure off of the PCI Express Bus itself and connecting multiple machines with crazy amounts of bandwidth. Isn’T even a rare use case with how much growth we’ve seen with data hungry cloud services for applications like AI gaming and Ultra highdef? Video data centers are already moving towards 400 gabit connections or even Beyond that’s 400 times faster than what you’ll find in most Garden. Variety desktop PCS, which is also part of why you simply don’t need PCI Express X32 in your personal rig, although I’m sure some of you are already thinking of ways you’re going to justify your purchase, hey thanks for watching this video like it. If you liked it dislike it, if you disliked it check out our other video on PCI, Express 6.0 comment below with video suggestions and don’t forget to subscribe and follow to Tech, quick, the channel, that’s all about doing the tech, real, quick .