PCIe 6.0 specification announced. Promise transfer rates up to 256GB / s

This week, the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) adopted the final specifications for PCI Express 6.0, although PCIe 5.0 has just begun to roll out into consumer products. The new standard doubles the bandwidth of the previous generation, delivering data transfer rates up to 64 GT / s (gigatransactions per second), and on x16 lines, bi-directional bandwidth reaches 256 GB / s.

PCIe 6.0 uses a 4-level Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM4) transmission scheme, as well as Error Correction (FEC) technology and a Data Integrity Check (CRC) algorithm to provide additional bandwidth values, improve efficiency, and reduce error rates that often affect PAM4. As before, PCIe 6.0 is backward compatible with previous PCIe generations.

“PCIe 6.0 technology is a cost-effective and scalable solution that will continue to impact data-intensive markets such as data center, artificial intelligence / machine learning, high performance computing, automotive, IoT, and military / aerospace,” said the president. PCI-SIG Al Yanes.

The latest version of PCI Express continues the tradition of doubling bandwidth approximately every three years. This technology is evolving so rapidly that consumer products take time to catch up. Regular users are just now starting to see the benefits of PCIe 4.0 SSDs for notebook computers, and the first PCIe 5.0 SSDs for servers were announced just a few weeks ago. It will take some time before PCIe 6.0 devices reach stores.

It is unlikely that anyone will need such bandwidth in the near future. For example, Samsung’s new PCIe 5.0 server SSD promises speeds of up to 13,000 MB / s, more than enough for any task.

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