Bidirectional 256GB/sec… PCIe 6.0 Product Coming Next Year

PCIe (PCI Express), a type of PC expansion bus, is currently 4.0 mainstream, but the final draft of the second-generation PCIe 6.0 specification has been announced. In addition, the final PCIe 6.0 specification is expected in the next few months, with the product expected to hit the market as early as 2022.

Although PCIe 4.0 is mainstream now, the final PCIe 5.0 specification with a data rate of 32 GT/sec and a maximum transfer rate of 128 GB/sec based on a x16 lane connection will be released in May 2019 and support PCIe 5.0 for the first time in the industry in May 2021. SSD controller was announced.

In addition, in June 2019, the PCIe 6.0 specification schedule was announced, which is twice PCIe 5.0 with a data rate of 64 GT/sec and a maximum transfer rate of 256 GB/sec based on x16 lane connection. The features described in the final version 0.9 of the released specification are as follows. It provides twice the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0 at 64 GT/sec, and up to 256 GB/sec in x16 configuration. The encoding corresponds to PAM4 signal transmission, has low-latency forward error correction and a mechanism to improve bandwidth efficiency, and is compatible with all previous-generation PCIe technologies.

PCI-SIG, a PCIe standard standardization organization, said that the final PCIe 6.0 specification will be released in late 2021 or early 2022 at the latest. It usually takes 12 to 18 months from the time the PCIe final specification is established and the product is actually released. Therefore, if the final PCIe 6.0 specification is set at the end of 2021, PCIe 6.0 support products are expected to be released at least at the end of 2022.

PCIe 6.0 technology is currently suitable for acceleration and machine learning or high-performance computing applications that require high I/O bandwidth. There is also a lot of interest in the automobile industry. The focus is on how to drive PCIe technology in response to the growing demand for bandwidth in the automotive ecosystem. Related information can be found here.