PCIe 4.0 has 64GB/sec bandwidth, PCIe 5.0 has 128GB/sec

PCI-SIG, the organization that defines the PCIe standard and its specifications with 730+ members across the world in the biggest countries on Earth including Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Dell, Intel, and many others - has announced the specifications for the PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 standards.

PCI Express 4.0 is expected to hit 16GT/s, with all of its features locked in, and rocking new performance enhancements over current PCIe 3.0, and will be positioned for the storage market, and cloud computing systems. PCIe 4.0 is capable of determining just how close to "the edge" each lane is operating at, all in real-time with PCIe 4.0's new Lane Margining at the Receiver feature. There are multiple companies already committed to PCIe 4.0, with "major vendors" offering 16GT/s controllers.

This new high-end interconnect technology isn't something we'll see on consumer motherboards anytime soon, even with Intel's newly gimped X299 chipset, or even AMD's beastly ThreadRipper-capable X399 chipset and its 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes. It's an underlined fact for the PCIe 5.0 standard which rocks 32GT/s of bandwidth, and is squarely aimed at the top of the IT market.

PCIe 5.0 is perfect for AI, machine learning, gaming, visual computing, storage, and network with its massive 128GB/sec of interconnect bandwidth - up from just 32GB/sec on PCIe 3.0 and even the 64GB/sec on PCIe 4.0. PCI-SIG has already signed off on 'Revision 0.'3 to PCI-SIG members, who are probably using them in accelerator and GPU attachments as PCI-SIG notes. The consortium also says that PCIe 5.0 is for "constricted form factor applications that cannot increase width and need frequency to achieve performance".

The super-fast PCIe 5.0 standard will support 400Gb Ethernet, offering 50GB/sec of bi-directional speeds - yeah, 50GB up and down. PCI-SIG notes that I/O bandwidth doubles each year, with PCIe 3.0 introduced in 2010, while PCIe 4.0 has taken longer (and not 3 years, PCI-SIG) to arrive. But, PCIe 5.0 is making up for it by dropping just 2 years after PCIe 4.0.

PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 Availability

PCI-SIG has a current ETA for products in the market with PCIe 4.0 sometime later this year, offering 16GT/s of bandwidth, while PCIe 5.0 won't be here until at least 2019, but will offer a huge 32GT/s of bandwidth.