PCIe 6.0 announced: lands in 2021, just as PCIe 4.0 arrives

AMD is about to usher in the PCIe 4.0 era with its new X570 chipset (and the purported even higher X590 chipset) alongside its next-gen Zen 2 CPU architecture and Navi-powered Radeon RX 5700/RX 5700 XT graphics cards, and now we're hearing about PCIe 6.0.

Yes, PCIe 6.0 - the successor to PCIe 5.0 which we should see Intel adopt in late-2020 and more 2021 and beyond, will roll out with an incredible amount of bandwidth. PCI-SIC, the group behind the PCIe standard said that PCIe 6.0 will have up to 64GT/s of bandwidth providing a PCIe 6.0 x16 slot up to an incredible 256GB/sec of bandwidth.

This is double PCIe 5.0 x16 with 128GB, and 4x the speed of PCIe 4.0 x16 which will provide 64GB/sec. PCIe 6.0 is a gigantic upgrade on our current-gen PCIe 3.0 x16 slot with just 32GB/sec of bandwidth in comparison, to the upcoming 256GB/sec on PCIe 6.0 x16. We most likely won't see consumer graphics cards taking advantage of this, but storage eats up a lot of those PCIe lands and future networking technology and AI accelerators will definitely chew it up.

The state of the market right now is that PCI-SIG set the PCIe 5.0 standard in May 2019 and "compliance testing is under development" while PCIe 6.0 is "targeted for publication in 2021".