• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

PCI Express 6.0 spec is finalized, doubling bandwidth for SSDs, GPUs, and more

tusharngf

Member

PCIe 6.0 will provide up to 256GB/s of bandwidth for next-gen servers and PCs.​


The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has finalized version 6.0 of the PCI Express standard, the communication bus that lets all the stuff inside your computer communicate. The new version of the spec comes roughly three years after the PCI Express 5.0 spec was finalized, and version 6.0 once again doubles the bandwidth of a PCIe lane from 32GT/s (8GB/s in total, or 4GB/s in each direction) to 64GT/s (16GB/s, or 8GB/s in each direction). For a full 16-lane PCIe 6.0 connection, that's as much as 256GB/s of total bandwidth, compared to the 32GB/s or 64GB/s of now-common PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 connections.

Like past PCIe versions, PCIe 6.0 will "interoperate and maintain backwards compatibility" with all existing PCIe versions, so your PCIe 4.0 GPU or SSD will continue to work in a PCIe 6.0 slot and vice-versa. The PCI-SIG bragged about the specification's longevity in a blog post by PCI-SIG board member Debendra Das Sharma: "An interconnect technology is considered successful if it can sustain three generations of bandwidth improvement spanning a decade. PCIe architecture has far exceeded that mark."

pcie-table-980x551.jpeg


To boost its speeds, PCIe 6.0 uses a new kind of signaling called "Pulse Amplitude Modulation 4" (PAM4), which allows for faster data transfers than the previous Non-Return-To-Zero (NRZ) signaling at the expense of a higher error rate. To compensate, PCIe 6.0 includes technologies like Forward Error Correction (FEC) to correct errors and Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) to ask for packets to be retransmitted when errors can't be corrected. The PCI-SIG says that this combination of technologies should catch all errors without adding latency to the connection.

Consumer systems are just beginning to support PCI Express 5.0—Intel's 12th-generation Core processors provide 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and AMD plans to support PCIe 5.0 with its upcoming Zen 4 architecture and Ryzen 7000-series CPUs. For now, PCIe 4.0 remains the most-used version of the spec for high-end SSDs and current-generation GPUs, and most budget PCIe SSDs still use PCI Express 3.0, which is more widely supported by older systems and is still plenty fast for most things. The PCI-SIG recognizes in its PCIe 6.0 FAQ that the new spec's bandwidth isn't necessary for most consumer applications, pitching it instead as an upgrade for data centers and artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.

The PCI-SIG expects that PCIe 6.0 products will begin hitting the market within 12 to 18 months.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...ed-doubling-bandwidth-for-ssds-gpus-and-more/
 

KungFucius

King Snowflake
It's interesting how quickly the buses are evolving now. PCIE 3.0 lasted for what seemed like a decade. PCIE4 was available in 2019 and is being replaced after less than 3 years. What is actually driving the need for more bandwidth? Is it consumer electronics or is it something more high end?
Funny how technology advances and no one can benefit from it, except maybe bots/miners and scalpers.
The latest GPUs could use PCIE 4 but there was not much improvement over PCIE 3 systems. A quick googling says it was a ~3% improvement. So miners have no real use for this until GPUs get even faster. Also they run their GPUs on any available bus and don't really require the interconnectivity to hash so it is a non factor.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Funny how technology advances and no one can benefit from it, except maybe bots/miners and scalpers.

Are Miners still using SSDs to mine?

And as for GPUs.
Miners basically use PCIEx1 going to PCIEx16 doesnt benefit mining.
 
Lol. Still waiting for gpus or nvmes to actually even utilize pcie 4.0. There is not even direct storage IO yet
technically they do but not much.

with GPU's the difference between 3.0 + 4.0 is pretty much negligible but on paper a 4.0 will outperform 3.0 but it's not even worth worrying about. SSD's are different though. you can get an SSD that does 7.1GB/s on PC. whether or not that makes a difference in gaming is a different story. we need to wait for DirectStorage like you say to really get the most out of SSDs.

PCIE 6.0 is a long time off and we shouldn't be concerned about it right now but 5.0 is welcome. with DirectStorage, DDR5 RAM, and PCIE 5.0 SSD's coming soon it's gonna give PC a huge boost over consoles. i mean they were always infront of consoles but DDR5/PCIE5.0 is gonna leave them in the dust. PS5 comes with a drive that can do 5.5GB/s but 5.0 will let us have drives of up to about 14.2GB/s.
 
Last edited:

GriffinCorp

Member
Exciting!

I've been wanting to build a PC but 3080's are still VERY hard to find. I'm guessing this won't be on gaming motherboards until 2024. Now, do I buy a gaming laptop "to hold me over" and build a pc in the coming years...Hmmm

With these speeds and I wonder if this will have a gap like 3.0 to 4.0, wasn't that like 5/7 years?
 
It's interesting how quickly the buses are evolving now. PCIE 3.0 lasted for what seemed like a decade. PCIE4 was available in 2019 and is being replaced after less than 3 years. What is actually driving the need for more bandwidth? Is it consumer electronics or is it something more high end?

The latest GPUs could use PCIE 4 but there was not much improvement over PCIE 3 systems. A quick googling says it was a ~3% improvement. So miners have no real use for this until GPUs get even faster. Also they run their GPUs on any available bus and don't really require the interconnectivity to hash so it is a non factor.
Are Miners still using SSDs to mine?

And as for GPUs.
Miners basically use PCIEx1 going to PCIEx16 doesnt benefit mining.

Just because it does not benefit them much doesnt mean they or others will stop scalping.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Just because it does not benefit them much doesnt mean they or others will stop scalping.

You think people will still be scalping GPUs and SSDs in 2025?
Hell you think any GPUs will even go to PCIE6 when PCIE5 is so so so far from being maxed out?
 
You think people will still be scalping GPUs and SSDs in 2025?
Hell you think any GPUs will even go to PCIE6 when PCIE5 is so so so far from being maxed out?

Scalping will never go away however chip/hardware productivity growing more in 2025 and onwards is possible but I have doubts about that as well. It seems the focus is more on AI doing all the work rather than relying on hardware which is I dunno...can;t really say what an impact that will have.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
Appreciate the specification being finalized but all of this advancement or announcements are so hollow and things are so hard to find or are super expensive.

This was more exciting 10 years ago to read stuff like this knowing that I would probably be able to walk in and be able to buy everything I wanted all at once at retail pricing
 

demigod

Member
Exciting!

I've been wanting to build a PC but 3080's are still VERY hard to find. I'm guessing this won't be on gaming motherboards until 2024. Now, do I buy a gaming laptop "to hold me over" and build a pc in the coming years...Hmmm

With these speeds and I wonder if this will have a gap like 3.0 to 4.0, wasn't that like 5/7 years?
Do you live in the USA and near a Microcenter? They have drops almost daily on 30xx cards.
 

Cryio

Member
I have an X570 AMD board, a 5700 XT that can leverage PCIe 4.0, a CPU that allows PCIe 4.0 lanes aaaaand a SATA 3 SSD.

I'm not hurting for a lack of PCIe 6.0. Or 5 for that matter.
 
Reading about how the new transmission mode is prone to high error rates has me thinking a lot about the stability of CPUs, RAM and graphics cards today. How things are overclocked to the limit and errors become a normal part of life. This is probably why mission critical components for say space work use super old and slow parts. They were basically error free. We're paying in stability for blazing fast speeds and it's only going to get worse from here. Nvidia themselves had an entire presentation about their latest GPUs using heavily overclocked memory which results in a ton of errors and they need to correct for these errors constantly. It's such a waste.
 

truth411

Member
So the PS6 will probably have PCIE 6 built in then. Sounds good to me.
Nah it will be potentially the inevitable PCIE 7, assuming a holiday 2028 release. (This is going to be a longer gen thanks to the global chip shortage, it will be probably be late 2023 when supply issues really start being ironed out.)
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Scalping will never go away however chip/hardware productivity growing more in 2025 and onwards is possible but I have doubts about that as well. It seems the focus is more on AI doing all the work rather than relying on hardware which is I dunno...can;t really say what an impact that will have.
When supply easily meets demand it wouldnt make sense to scalp.
So as soon as all the foundaries in check scalping wont really be a thing.
 

BigBooper

Member
Very excited to see what storage looks like in a few years. I know there's already cards for mounting nvme drives to pcie, but hopefully something more convenient than that. Needs some kind of nvme ported standard, with cabling like sata.
 
Last edited:
Now wait 'till 2025 before you see any motherboards or products leveraging it (in consumer electronics market).

TBH PCIe is becoming a dead-end; CXL is where it's at. Lower latency, native cache coherency/data coherency, and enabling processor-to-processor & processor-to-memory as well as standard processor-to-storage.

I had heard that some features of CXL would potentially be implemented in future PCIe specifications but that it doesn't look like any of the meaty ones are in PCIe 6.0 at least going by the info in the OP. Oh well; regardless storage on NVMe Gen 6 will be insanely good; at that point decompression might serve a role more related to volume savings than bandwidth savings.

Reading about how the new transmission mode is prone to high error rates has me thinking a lot about the stability of CPUs, RAM and graphics cards today. How things are overclocked to the limit and errors become a normal part of life. This is probably why mission critical components for say space work use super old and slow parts. They were basically error free. We're paying in stability for blazing fast speeds and it's only going to get worse from here. Nvidia themselves had an entire presentation about their latest GPUs using heavily overclocked memory which results in a ton of errors and they need to correct for these errors constantly. It's such a waste.

Well, a lot of mission-critical industry use other interconnect standards like Rapid IO (open-standard), CXL, OMI (Open Memory Interconnect, an open-standard interconnect based on IBM's OpenCapi), etc. Some of these are layered on top of PCIe but some are completely divorced from it. Even for the ones that are layered on top of PCIe, like CXL, they have a completely different implementation of the logic layer.

From what I can tell all of them are way less prone to errors than PCIe, which has always been meant as an interconnect only for peripheral devices, and to do more than that has resulted in some pretty funky changes (some proprietary) that complicate the topography, which can introduce additional lag and potential errors. For just regular PCIe, these rapidly increasing bandwidths are prone to introduce more errors but I assume the bandwidth speeds are enough to mitigate errors and it's not like there aren't redundancies built into the specification to handle errors responsibly.

Still tho, IMO PCIe's got a good number of limitations just inherent to the specification and maybe in the next decade (or sooner, hopefully) we shift to CXL for mass-market consumer devices. All the technology partners are onboard for it, maybe it's a matter of timing or pricing. Also maybe Intel might bring some of those features into a future PCIe specification.
 
Last edited:

mckmas8808

Banned
Nah it will be potentially the inevitable PCIE 7, assuming a holiday 2028 release. (This is going to be a longer gen thanks to the global chip shortage, it will be probably be late 2023 when supply issues really start being ironed out.)

I never considered this. Hmmmm.....this will kinda suck. :-(
 
Top Bottom