PCIe 6.0 Specs Finalized to Double Bandwidth for Up to 256GB/s via x16 Lanes

The PC industry is still in the early stages of adopting PCIe 5.0, but that isn’t stopping development of PCIe 6.0.

On Tuesday, the standards group PCI-SIG published the finalized specification for PCIe 6.0, which doubles the bandwidth and power efficiency over the slightly older PCIe 5.0 spec. That means PCIe 6.0 can transfer up to 128 Gb/seconds in each direction over an x16 configuration, for “a maximum bidirectional bandwidth of up to 256 GB/s,” according to PCI-SIG.

In addition, PCIe 6.0 will be backwards-compatible with all previous PCIe generations.

PCIe is important because it functions as the standard interface used to connect PC parts together, such as graphics cards and storage drives. The same interface is used across servers and supercomputers, which need to process large amounts of data at high speeds.

For consumers, a major benefit to an upgraded PCIe spec is faster memory. Vendors are still in early stages of releasing NVME drives with PCIe 5.0. However, they can reach 14,000MB/s in read speeds, or about double what the fastest SSD drives built with PCIe 4.0 can achieve.

PCIe 6.0 is poised to take the speeds to the next level. But it’ll take some years before the technology arrives on consumer PC systems, as evidenced by the older PCIe 5.0 spec, which was finalized in May 2019. Only in recent months has PCIe 5.0 begun arriving in PCs through Intel’s 12th generation “Alder Lake” Core processors and supported motherboards. AMD, on the other hand, is set to begin adopting PCie 5.0 later this year with the Ryzen 7000 processors.

It's also up to hardware makers on when to adopt the spec. In the meantime, PCI-SIG standards group is promoting PCIE 6.0 as an important technology that’ll pave the way for data center operators to upgrade the speeds on their servers and supercomputers.

:story: PCMag