Although we are all still waiting for PCI-Express 4.0 to become available, the PCI-SIG has announced that they are finalising the development of PCI-Express 5.0 which is designed to offer 128GB/s of total bandwidth. In other words the total bandwidth would increase by a factor of four compared to the current PCIe 3.0 in the case of a x16 configuration. The PCIe 3.0 standard has been here since quite some time (2010) offering a level of bandwidth that starts to be a limiting factor due to PCIe NVMe storage products and the growth of the GPU compute.


The PCI-SIG consortium announced that defining the specifications of PCI-Express 4.0 is going to be finalized later this year, while PCI-Express 5.0 will be finalized later in Q1 2019. PCI-Express 5.0 will further increase the bandwidth of PCIe lanes, which in turn will allow vendors to create faster devices. Specification wise, PCI-Express 4.0 will offer 2x the bandwidth of PCI-Express 3.0, while PCI-Express 5.0 will offer 4x the bandwidth. Therefore a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface is going to offer the same bandwidth as a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. In addition, it would for example be possible to create 400Gb/s Ethernet interfaces for the enterprise environment.

In a continuous effort to ensure that the industry moves on, the PCI Express 5.0 specifications are being developed although PCI Express 4.0 has not even made it to market yet. Since Intel is already using exotic memory subsystems like Optane that require extra PCIe lanes, we’d expect to see other vendors coming up with devices that require different PCI-Express specifications soon.





Source: Techpowerup