On Tuesday, the PCI-SIG group released the finalised specifications for PCIe 6.0, which doubles the bandwidth and power efficiency compared to PCIe 5.0.
PCIe 6.0 gets an increased data rate of 64 GT per second and can transfer up to 128GB per second in each direction for x16 lanes, doubling PCIe 5.0’s specifications. The 6th version provides lower latency and reduced bandwidth overhead when compared to its predecessor.
According to PCI-SIG, PCIe 6.0 can offer a “maximum bidirectional bandwidth of up to 256GB per second for x16 lanes”. It is also backwards-compatible with all previous generations of PCIe tech.
The announcement comes three years after the previous release and promises to be a cost-effective and scalable solution that’ll find application in AI, ML, IoT, high-performance computing, automotive, aerospace, military and data-intensive markets.
The projected market growth of PCI Express technology suggests that it’ll grow steadily in the consumer market, as well as Cloud and Enterprise, with over 800,000 petabytes of SSDs expected to be sold in 2025. In 2021, over 225,000 petabytes of SSDs were shipped.
While PCI-SIG has released the specifications for the new version, the industry still has a lot of catching up to do. PCIe 5.0 is still being adapted across the consumer and enterprise industries. PCs have barely begun shipping with PCIe 5.0 specs, which is also a new inclusion in the enterprise world.
“With the storage industry transitioning to PCIe 4.0 technology and on the cusp of introducing PCIe 5.0 technology, companies will begin adopting PCIe 6.0 technology in their roadmaps to future-proof their products and take advantage of the high bandwidth and low latency that PCI Express technology offers,” said Greg Wong, Founder and Principal Analyst, Forward Insights.
The full specifications for PCIe 6.0 are available here.
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