The PCI-SIG continues to make progress on the development of the next generation of PCIe technology – the PCIe 6.0 specification. Where you reach 16 GB/s on your PCIe Gen 3 x16 slot, that will be 128 GB/s when PCIe Gen 6 arrives.
First announced three months ago during our U.S. Developers Conference in June, the PCI-SIG members have fast-tracked development and Revision 0.3 of the specification is now complete and available to PCI-SIG member companies for review and input. PCI-SIG expects that we will be able to complete the final specification by 2021.
PCIe 6.0 technology will double the data rate to 64 GT/s while maintaining backward compatibility with all previous spec generations. Two of the key changes that are implementing include PAM-4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) encoding and low-latency Forward Error Correction (FEC) with additional mechanisms to improve bandwidth efficiency.
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PCIe Version | Line Code | Transfer Rate | x1 Bandwidth | x4 | x8 | x16 |
| 1.0 | 8b/10b | 2.5 GT/s | 250 MB/s | 1 GB/s | 2 GB/s | 4 GB/s |
| 2.0 | 8b/10b | 5 GT/s | 500 MB/s | 2 GB/s | 4 GB/s | 8 GB/s |
| 3.0 | 128b/130b | 8 GT/s | 984.6 MB/s | 4 GB/s | 8 GB/s | 16 GB/s |
| 4.0 | 128b/130b | 16 GT/s | 1.969 GB/s | 8 GB/s | 16 GB/s | 32 GB/s |
| 5.0 | 128b/130b | 32 GT/s | 4 GB/s | 16 GB/s | 32 GB/s | 64 GB/s |
| 6.0 | tba | 64 GT/s | 8 GB/s | 32GB/s | 64 GB/s | 128 GB/s |
