Obscure $10 billion chip firm you never heard of finally delivers crucial tech for AI future — Astera Labs showcased its Aries 6 PCIe retimer board as it targets future Nvidia HGX boards

Astera Labs, a relatively unknown semiconductor company with a $10 billion market value, recently showed off its new Aries 6 PCIe retimer board, which it is now sampling to leading AI and cloud infrastructure providers.

Due to the high-speed data transfer within the PCIe interface, the signals can suffer from degradation, especially over longer distances or due to interference. A PCIe retimer helps maintain the data signal integrity 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, offer robust, low power, and efficient PCIe 6.x and CXL 3.x connectivity, squarely aimed at catering to the networking requirements of next-generation GPUs, accelerators, CPUs, and CXL memory controllers.

3x the reach

Based on Intel’s Retimer Supplemental Specification, the new Aries 6 retimers build upon the company’s widely deployed PCIe 5.0 retimer portfolio and reportedly extend reach distance by three times the standard rate.

Casey Morrison, Chief Product Officer, Astera Labs, said, “PCIe 6.x technology’s superior bandwidth is required to handle data-intensive workloads and to maximize utilization of AI accelerators, but the faster speeds introduce new signal integrity issues in 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’re proud that our third generation of Aries Retimers with support for PCIe 6.x, PCIe 5.x, and CXL 3.x have now been sampled to leading AI and cloud platform providers.”

ServeTheHome took a first look at Astera Labs’s new portfolio at Nvidia GTC 2024 (see the photograph above) and observed that the “Aries 6 was linked at PCIe Gen6 x16 speeds at 10-11W of power consumption. That is a big deal since it is lower than Broadcom is claiming with its new retimers.“

Many major AI firms are excited about the imminent arrival of Astera Labs’ new generation Aries Smart DSP Retimers. Raghu Nambiar, Corporate Vice President, Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions, AMD, said, “Our close collaboration with Astera Labs on PCIe technologies ensures our customers’ platforms continue to meet the higher bandwidth connectivity requirements of next-generation AI and HPC workloads,” while Brian Kelleher, Senior Vice President of GPU Engineering, Nvidia, added, “Astera Labs’ new Aries Smart DSP Retimers with support for PCIe 6.2 will help enable higher bandwidth to optimize utilization of our next-generation computing platforms.”

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