Find answers to the most frequently asked questions about our products and technologies.
FAQs
Is a Retimer essentially a two-port PCIe packet switch?
Not quite, each port of a packet switch has a full PCIe protocol stack:
Physical Layer, Data Link Layer, and Transaction Layer.
A packet switch has at least one root port and at least one non-root port.
A Retimer, by contrast, has an upstream-facing Physical Layer and a downstream-facing Physical Layer but no Data Link or Transaction Layer.
As such, a Retimer’s ports are considered pseudo ports because a Retimer does not have — nor does it need — these higher-logic layers, the latency through a Retimer is much smaller compared to the latency through a packet switch.