A couple of years ago, Avago/Broadcom increased the prices of its PLX PCIe switches and several motherboard manufacturers stopped to use them. Since the PCIe switches are used primarily in servers, they come with a premium price. However some motherboard manufacturers still want to implement such a technology in their products, for this reason other companies are offering new switches.


A few days ago we have published first news about upcoming Marvell switches and it looks like that ASMedia wants join as well. With the ASM2824, ASMedia is offering a chip with one PCIe 3.0 x8 upstream port as well as four PCIe 3.0 x4 downstream ports. This would let to create four M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots from 8 downstream PCIe lanes of the Intel Z390 chipset. In this way, Intel might use the remaining PCIe lanes for USB 3.1 controllers.

With all the four NVMe SSDs installed the ASM2824 switch promises RAID bandwidths of up to 6'500MB/s. So far ASMedia has not revealed details on pricing and availability on their ASM2824 PCIe 3.0 switch but we are sure we will know more during upcoming months.




Source: Techpowerup