The new Astera Labs Aries 6 is the company’s next-generation PCIe Gen6 and CXL retimer. This announcement comes on the heels of Broadcom Firing a Shot at Astera Labs with New PCIe and CXL Retimers. In the week since Broadcom announced it would be re-entering the PCIe retimer market, Astera Labs filed for an IPO estimated at $4.5B. It is now ready to talk about its next generation.
Astera Labs Aries 6 PCIe Gen6 Retimers
Today, if a system is using a PCIe Gen5 retimer, it is most likely an Astera Labs Aries retimer. Broadcom exited the market thinking it would be a commodity, then other competitive offerings largely failed to gain adoption. Those two factors combined to make Aries 5 by far the most common retimer we have observed in AMD EPYC Genoa/ Bergamo and Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids PCIe Gen5 servers.
One of the biggest challenges with PCIe Gen6 is the trace length. It is not as dramatic as when we went from PCIe Gen3 to Gen4 or Gen4 to Gen5, but PCIe Gen6 again shortens the practical PCB trace lengths. What is important to keep in mind is that in high-value servers with many GPUs, large NVMe storage arrays, and so forth, the chassis is much larger than today’s 1U servers both in the vertical and often horizontal directions. Combined, this means that the distance PCIe must travel is increasing while the distance PCIe Gen6 will be able to travel is decreasing. Cabling instead of PCB can help, but retimers have become important.
As one would imagine, since Astera Labs is riding largely on Aries for its $4.5B IPO valuation, it has a PCIe Gen6 retimer coming.
The new generation also will support CXL 3 signaling, and CXL will become much more important in next year’s servers. The company is also set to have a lower power timer than Broadcom at only 11W at Gen6 speeds.
Astera’s solution is not just a state machine with some telemetry. Instead it has enough software defined capabilities that it can help identify problems in the field, and tag them for hyper-scale infrastructure providers. An example here might be if a GPU server has a specific cable causing link issues. Another might be a set of devices not behaving consistently in a fleet because of hardcoded assumptions in their PCIe implementation.
A big capability for Astera Labs is the ability to own the handshake between the two devices. As such, it can help tune signaling through the retimer for specific chassis, devices, and so forth. Also, this information helps hyperscale operators determine if a particular node needs to be serviced to keep high-value GPUs and accelerators online.
Final Words
One of the other big advantages that Astera Labs has is time. Aries 6 is already sampling and the company has both retimer boards and an interoperability lab that is already testing devices.
The company is not remaining idle. Instead, it has a new generation and is sampling ahead of Broadcom’s chips.
Since I got a lot of requests for consulting calls on the PCIe retimer market after our previous piece, we have an Axautik Group LLC Research Short for the Astera Labs and Broadcom releases over the past week to answer some of the common questions I have fielded recently.
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Great Job!!!