By The architecture that links graphics cards and SSDs, PCI Express 5.0, has become synonymous with high-end PCs in recent years. With the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) reaching a significant milestone this year to provide the higher-bandwidth PCI Express 6 to PCs, that is almost about to change.
The majority of today’s PCI SIG news is theoretical in nature; the SIG is establishing the foundation for PCIe 8.0 and has publicly announced PCIe 7.0, which is anticipated to be released in 2027. In the meantime, PCI Express can now operate over optical links thanks to PCI-SIG.
All of that will eventually have an impact. The PCIe 6.0 integrator’s list, which is anticipated to be revealed in 2025, may be the most significant news.
The PCI-SIG collaborates with industry partners to produce the PCI Express definition, just as other industry consortia. After creating its own specifications, the SIG verifies that every product complies with them. Lastly, it releases the list of real items tested against the specification by its integrators. AMD’s own 7th-generation Ryzen CPUs, which came on the market in 2022 after AMD’s 12th-generation “Alder Lake” chips as the first PC processors featuring PCI Express 5.0 connectors, are currently near the top of the list.
Some people overlook the PCI Express SIG’s poor speed and parallel timetables. Even though we haven’t seen a single PCIe 6 product yet, the SIG has already moved on to PCI Express 6.3, and the final 1.0 standard of PCIe 6 was officially issued in 2022. This indicates that the industry has progressed beyond the specification stage to the testing and development of new products.
According to the PCI SIG today, the first list of integrators linked to PCI Express 6 is anticipated to be released in 2025. The first PCI Express 6.0 CPUs, chipsets, SSDs, and graphics cards may therefore make their appearance by the end of the year, about the same time that Intel’s next-generation Panther Lake chip is anticipated.
On paper, we know what PCIe 6 is capable of: 64 gigatransfers per second, or 256GB/s on an x16 connection of a dedicated graphics card and 64GB/s on the x4 connectors used by SSDs. Over an x16 connection, PCIe 7 will provide 512GB/s of bidirectional I/O bandwidth, which is double that of PCI Express 6’s 256GB/s and four times that of PCI Express 5’s 128GB/s.
