back to article Final PCIe 6.0 specs unleashed: 64 GTps link speed incoming... with products to follow in 2023

The completed PCIe 6.0 specifications have finally been unleashed by the PCI-SIG consortium, effectively doubling the speed of the PCIe standard by supporting 64 gigatransfers per second (GTps) with 16 lanes running at 256 GBps. Announcing the release, the PCI-SIG said that PCIe 6.0 would deliver record performance to power …

  1. J27

    I don't think anyone has a consumer use for this yet. PCIe 4 isn't being saturated by GPUs yet. I'm sure there is a business case somewhere though, data centers have basically unlimited bandwidth needs.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Don't forget the cost

      Double the speed, half the latency... That sound about a 50% rise in even cheap motherboard costs to me.

      The computing devices that I have are powerful than I need at the moment. I guess that PCI-5.0 and 6.0 will pass me by. Ok, I'm not into gaming other than solitaire and sudoku. Those are hardly the sort of games that need a top-flight CPU and motherboard.

    2. Wormy

      I'd buy it today if it were available (for work). Constantly hitting up against the PCIe bottleneck, particularly on older PCIe 3.0 systems, but even to some extent on 4.0. With the limited number of lanes available to things like front-facing NVMe, 6.0 will be fantastically useful.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I don't think anyone has a consumer use for this yet.

      Getting Windows to start up in under a minute?

      :)

      1. Victor Ludorum
        Unhappy

        I think Micros~1 will work their magic to ensure that even PCIe 8.0 equipped devices will still take at least a minute to boot up...

        1. Old Used Programmer

          Never underestimate MS

          It used to be said that Microsoft could burn up every processor cycle Intel could manufacture.

      2. bazza Silver badge

        Even my ancient rig with a SATA SSD boots Windows 10 in under a minute. In fact, dual boot Linux takes longer on the same machine...

        1. mark l 2 Silver badge

          I notice that on my dual boot machine Windows 10 gets to the login screen quicker than my Linux Mint install, but after logging in I get a usable desktop quicker on my Linux install. Windows shows the desktop but then carries on loading stuff in the background making things unresponsive for a few seconds longer.

          And this is on a clean install of both OS not with loads of 3rd party applications running on start-up.

      3. Tom 7

        Gotta get those updates ASAP.

    4. Steve Todd

      NVMe SSDs are already saturating PCIe 4.0

      and PCIe 5 SSDs are already starting to appear. GPUs aren't the only things that chew bandwidth.

      Add to that CXL is paving the way to unified memory access, where GPU RAM and CPU RAM are effectively shared, so the faster the link the better.

    5. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

      90% of current GPU's on the market aren't even fully saturating the PCI-E 3.0 bandwidth... Let alone PCI-E 4.0

      But that's not where this is targeted anyway... It's more to do with storage transfer speeds... I'm fine with PCI-E 4.0 at the moment... My PC boots in 7 seconds from Post to Login on a Sabrent Rocket PCI-E 4.0 NVME... whilst my PCI-E 3.0 NVME WD Black on my mediaserver takes about 11 seconds. Games stored on another 1TB NVME (3.0) load super fast already.

      Hardly a problem for 99.9% of people these days... Content creators and Enterprise use is where this could be needed.

      But given the price rises we saw in PCI-E 4.0 consumer motherboards and drives... and then again with 5.0... 6.0 could see average prices of motherboards double from 3-6... and that's before the price hikes and gouging due to 'pandemic' shortages.

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  3. Apprentice Human

    But what about my wife's gaming rig?

    No really....

    The major users are the people that pay me. So data centers, cloud computing, etc.

    But when will this turn up in the domestic equipment for gamers is the question I have. It's much more peaceful hearing my wife button-mash to "Fuck, fuck, fuck" that the angst of slow loading games.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: But what about my wife's gaming rig?

      Oh I wouldn't worry. Nvidia will have PCIe 6-compatible GPUs by next year.

      Given that I have just upgraded my 10-year-old desktop last November, I'm planning on taking advantage of my 3080 until my retirement. By then, my next upgrade will clearly be PCIe 6-compatible across the board.

      1. Hubert Cumberdale

        Re: But what about my wife's gaming rig?

        And I look forward to buying your 3080 when it has a sensible price tag.

    2. Tom 7

      Re: But what about my wife's gaming rig?

      I doubt the slow loading of games is anything PCI related. More likely a slow DB at the gaming centre trying to store your e-mail and work schedule.

    3. Binraider Silver badge

      Re: But what about my wife's gaming rig?

      Some folks really need to experience game loading on a C64, pre fastloader, from tape... Or an Atari 800, which never improved in software to my knowledge.

      Still keep a C64 around, but mostly driven by SD to IEC and an Epyx Fastloader.

    4. Boothy

      Re: But what about my wife's gaming rig?

      Might be a while yet for PCIE 6.0

      For PCIE 5.0, Intel's Alder Lake CPUs (12900K etc) which just came out, now support PCIE 5.0.

      AMD CPUs only support PCIE 4.0 currently, but the new Zen 4 architecture due out some time later this year, will also support PCIE 5.0.

      For PCIE 6.0, it's going to be at least one, but I suspect more likely more, additional CPU generations, before PCIE 6.0 gets added to mainstream CPUs.

    5. Boothy

      Re: But what about my wife's gaming rig?

      For what it's worth, faster SSDs don't really help all that much with gaming. At least not in the bench marking I've seen.

      To be clear, going from a HDD to any SSD (even a budget 2.5" SATA SSD) is a big jump and very much worth doing.

      But then going from a SATA SSD, to say a M.2 NVME SSD, only has minimal impact. A lot of the game loading time is the game engine processing the data, so once you've removed the HDD as a bottleneck, the game engine itself, along with CPU etc, become the bottleneck instead.

      This will likely improve over time, as game engines get updated to take advantage of solid storage, especially now that current gen consoles also have SSDs.

  4. BOFH in Training

    Well, I can think of 1x PCIE 6 links being sufficient for NVME drives for most people. Imagine finally being able to have multiple NVME drives in most systems.

    It's irritating when most of my systems / laptops are limited to 2 (if not 1) without getting an extender or something else.

    For the more advanced users / gamers, maybe an x8 PCIE 6 link will be enough for a GPU for the forseeable future. That leaves many PCIE lanes available for other things.

    Even people fiddling with ML stuff (or hardcore gamers) will find it easier to have multiple GPUs in a desktop. Assuming GPUs become commonly available at MSRPs again.

    1. Boothy

      I've got a desktop, self built (AMD X570), and one of the reasons I bought this specific motherboard was that it had 3 NVME M.2 slots.

      The only limitation, is if you use the 3rd M.2 slot, you sacrifice the last PCIE slot, as they share the same PCIE lanes. But the board has three full size PCIE slots (plus one little one), and I only have a single GFX card, so didn't need the 3rd full size PCIE slot anyway (or even the 2nd one really, as that's got nothing plugged in currently either).

      Got a single boot drive initially (EVO Pro), then over about 18 months, bought two additional drives, this time cheaper and slower, but still NVME (still very fast compared to a SATA SSD), but at half the cost of the Samsung. This is where my games live.

  5. Binraider Silver badge

    With the obvious exceptions of monstrosities like rendering 8k video in realtime at 120+Hz, and the "infinite" bandwidth needed in datacentre world... Am I the only one thinking I'd rather see investment in reducing the cost of hardware for a change?

    The 16-bit ISA bus was a feature on PC's for well over a decade. PCI a similar timeframe. PCI-e doesn't last 5 minutes before there's a next new shiny version.

    It won't happen, but perhaps scaling back the endless collection of (useless) data and leaning down system requirements would be better than infinitely scaling up yet more storage systems.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      While we're day-dreaming, how about a new version of Windows where the GUI isn't a radical departure from the previous version? In fact, feature-freeze the GUI for 5-10 years and instead fix bugs in the OS itself? That would be handy for once.

      1. Boothy

        Or have the GUI as a themed system, so rather than just Light and Dark options, you could pick a theme that has different min/max/close icons, different shaped corners, transparency, colours, etc etc.

        Release the OS with one or two official themes, but then provide a dev kit (or just a guide) on how to create your own.

        We could then have things like an XP, or Windows 2000 theme etc.

        1. DuncanLarge Silver badge

          Blasphemy!

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