PLX PCI Express Gen 2 Switch Enables ASUS Motherboard Showcasing World's First True SATA 6Gb/s

The PLX ExpressLane PEX 8613 is a low-power PCIe Gen 2 switch that offers 12 lanes and three ports, and a scalable high-bandwidth interconnection to a wide variety of designs and applications. Any port can be independently configured for different input/output speeds, whether PCIe Gen 1 (2.5GT/s) or Gen 2 (5.0 GT/s), thus allowing a Gen 1 CPU or endpoints to talk to Gen 2 devices and vice-versa. Although any Gen 2 device can down-train to Gen 1, resulting in one-half the bandwidth, the PLX PCIe Gen 2 switches preserve the full Gen 2 performance by matching X number of Gen 2 lanes with 2X the number of Gen 1 lanes.



Using the PLX PEX 8613 switch as a bridge, P7P55D Premium was able to connect two Gen 2 lanes on the SATA 6Gb/s endpoint to four Gen 1 lanes on the Intel P55 chipset. This flexibility can be found in all PLX PCIe Gen 2 switches, thus allowing designers to take advantage of the newest and highest-performance solutions, while simultaneously accommodating legacy designs.



The newly released ASUS P7P55D Premium motherboard features the world's first true SATA 6Gb/s motherboard access and many more innovations in over-clocking support, unique cooling and cutting-edge power efficiency. The P7P55D Premium offers users freedom of choice in multi-GPU execution by use of either AMD CrossFireX or NVIDIA SLI graphics cards. The P7P55D Premium is based on Intel's P55 chipset and supports Intel's Lynnfield-based Core i5 and Core i7 processors.



The ASUS P7P55D Premium motherboard, supported by the PLX switch, is an industry-first innovative design with true SATA 6Gb/s connectivity and features cutting-edge performance, said Chewei Lin, general manager, Motherboard Business Unit, ASUS. ASUS and PLX share the goal of providing excellence in quality and technology. Both companies strive for leadership through differentiation and we look forward to future projects together.



We are pleased to see ASUS creatively executing on their designs by using PLX switches to reach their goals, said Gene Schaeffer, vice president of global sales at PLX. ASUS is an important customer for PLX, and through our leadership in high-speed serial interconnect solutions we have been able to provide that company with products that exceed its requirements.



PLX offers more than 40 ExpressLane PCIe Gen 2 switches, all of which are fully compliant with the PCI-SIG PCI Express Base Specification 2.0 and published on that group's exclusive Integrators List. With an industry-leading array of PCIe switch devices ranging from four to 96 lanes and three to 24 ports, PLX has shipped 16 million PCIe ports to board and system designers worldwide. The feature-rich devices are backed by a superior software development kit that streamlines the design experience and shortens time to market. Every PLX Gen 2 device also incorporates an exclusive integrated non-transparency (NT) functionality that helps designers avoid the additional costs and performance loss of other solutions.