Despite the fact that AMD has already implemented PCIe 4.0 in its Ryzen 3000 series processors graphics cards, while Intel is still stuck in PCIe 3.0 after abandoning its plans for PCIe 4.0 at Comet Lake. Meanwhile, PCI-SIG, which creates the PCIe specification, today announced version 5.0 of the upcoming PCIe 6.0 specification, which has eight times the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0.
PCIe 6.0 makes the leap to an impressive 64 GTps per track
In spite of the fact that we haven’t seen any products that support PCIe 5.0 yet, PCI-SIG has first announced that they will be releasing the PCIe 6.0 specification in October. The specification’s leap in bandwidth is no surprise, as each new generation of PCIe doubles the bandwidth of the previous one. While PCIe 3.0 has a bandwidth of 8 GTps per track, PCIe 4.0 doubles this to 16 GTps and PCIe 5.0 jumps to 32 GTps. Logically, PCIe 6.0 makes the leap to an impressive 64 GTps per track.
That’s about 8 GBps per track for PCIe 6.0, which would mean almost 128 GBps per slot for a 16-track slot. So it wouldn’t be surprising if the arrival of PCIe 6.0 devices meant that the days of full-length PCIe slots were numbered. The first sign of this was the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card, which only requires 8 tracks thanks to PCIe 4.0 support.
According to PCI-SIG, the PCIe 6.0 specification is on its way to release in 2021, but this does not mean that we will see products with this standard in 2021; it just means that hardware vendors will start developing products with this standard.
The main areas that will benefit from a faster PCIe, at least initially, are extrapolation systems such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. It will probably take much longer for individual consumers to start using the increased bandwidth.
The PCI-SIG will provide further details at their next developer conference from June 3-4.
Via: PCI SIG