What just happened? The PCI-SIG (Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group) has just announced the PCIe 6.0 specification. That's rather quick given that PCIe 5.0 specs were made public just a month ago. And it's way ahead of the market adoption rate for PCIe 4.0 for which consumers have just started to get excited about.
Motherboard manufactures will have lots of hardware added to their pipeline as PCIe 6.0 specifications were announced yesterday at the PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2019. The successor to PCIe 5.0 revealed last month looks to double transfer speeds with 256GB/s transfers. This quadruples the speed of PCIe 4.0 hardware that's just started to make its way to consumers.
Given its history, the industry standard usually takes around a year between its announcement and market availability of supported hardware. With PCIe 5.0 unlikely to arrive until 2020 at the earliest, the consortium expects PCIe 6.0 to finalize by 2021 after which consumers can expect to see supported hardware in 2022 or 2023.
"Continuing the trend we set with the PCIe 5.0 specification, the PCIe 6.0 specification is on a fast timeline," said Al Yanes, PCI-SIG Chairman and President. "Due to the continued commitment of our member companies, we are on pace to double the bandwidth yet again in a time frame that will meet industry demand for throughput."
The PCIe 6.0 spec is targeted at evolving industry needs which will greatly benefit AI accelerated applications, NVMe storage and of course, GPUs.