The PCIe 6.0 standard coming from 2021: New doubling of bandwidth
The new PCI Express specifications of the future will be standardized for 2021, but its adoption is not expected before at least another two years. In exchange values of bandwidth 8 times higher than the current ones.
The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has announced that it is working to define the new PCI Express Gen 6.0 specifications, which will be the basis of the hardware products that we will see in commerce in a few years.
The timing of this announcement is undoubtedly very interesting: we are about to see at the debut the first PCI Express Gen 4.0 devices, in the form of the AMD Ryzen processor platforms based on X570 chipset, and the AMD Radeon RX 5700 video cards equipped with GPU Navi.
Just a few weeks ago the PCI Express 5.0 specifications were announced, which implement a doubling of bandwidth compared to what can be achieved with PCI Express Gen 4.0 devices. In turn, the latter bring a doubling of the bandwidth compared to the previous standard, which is currently used by the vast majority of the components offered for sale on the market.
The PCI Express Gen 6.0 specifications provide a very high-bandwidth value on the card: we will reach 128GB / s with a 16-line connection, typical of PC peripherals such as video cards.
In any case, it will take time before this becomes a reality: the PCI-SIG expects to be able to finalize the specifications of the standard during 2021, then in 2 years. But it will not be before 2024-2025 that we will see the first PCI Express Gen 6.0 products on the market, capable of maximum bandwidth values 8 times higher than those of peripherals currently on sale on the market.
