PCIe 4.0 arrives in 2017, PCIe 5.0 comes in 2019

We're currently going through the first few weeks of AMD's new Radeon RX Vega graphics card launch, and we're now hearing about PCI-Express 4.0 and 5.0 from PCI-SIG, the organization behind the PCI-Express standard.

The upcoming PCIe 4.0 standard will ramp up the interconnect bandwidth from 8GT/s to 16GT/s, and will arrive sometime next year.

Then the big leap happens with PCIe 5.0 which will push it right up to 32GT/s, offering 128GB/sec through the PCIe 5.0 slot (compared to just 32GB/sec from PCIe 3.0 and 64GB/sec from PCIe 4.0).

PCIe 5.0 will usher in 400GbE network connections possible, but the new standards will also pack enough of a punch in the bandwidth departments that we'll see major increases in performance for multi-GPU systems, with NVIDIA possibly removing the SLI connector from future GeForce graphics cards.