PCI-SIG, the organization behind the PCIe standard has released the finalized specs on PCIe 4.0, with some highlights that impress. We have up to 16GT/s of bandwidth with PCIe 4.0, up from the 8GT/s of bandwidth offered on PCIe 3.0 - but it's PCIe 5.0 that has my mouth watering with a huge 32GT/s of bandwidth, and will arrive in 2019.
As for the PCIe 4.0 highlights, this is what Chairman and President of PCI-SIG, Al Yanes, had to say:
- Extended tags and credits for service devices
- Reduced system latency
- Lane margining
- Superior RAS capabilities
- Scalability for added lanes and bandwidth
- Improved I/O virtualization and platform integration
What will PCIe 4.0 provide us, other than just ridiculous amounts of bandwidth? As Tom's Hardware points out, PCIe 4.0 will provide the bandwidth to make cheaper NVMe SSDs possible, as they'll need just half the PCIe lanes, while 10GbE connections over a single PCIe lane would be made possible. That kind of speed is impossible right now with limited PCIe lanes.
- Read more: PCIe 8.0 is coming in 2028 with 256 GT/s speeds and eight times the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0
- Read more: PCI-SIG intros PCIe 8.0 specs: 256 GT/s bandwidth, with 1TB/sec bi-directional on x16 port
- Read more: PCI-SIG releases PCIe 7.0 specs: up to 128GT/s transfers, next-gen PCIe 8.0 in the works
We shouldn't expect Intel to adopt PCIe 4.0 until at least mid-2019, with AMD announcing support for PCIe 4.0 for sometime in 2020. PCIe 5.0 on the other hand should be finalized before then, with PCIe 5.0 products planned for 2020-2023, which is quite a while away from now.
Once we get to the point of having PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 on our motherboards, we can start talking about single graphics cards running 4K 120 and 8K 60, as well as super high-end VR/AR/MR technology that will require some truly next-gen GPUs to run at 120FPS or more.
