Quote:PCI-SIG also teased the upcoming PCIe 5.0 specification. Penciled in for 2019, PCIe 5.0 will push the available bandwidth to 32 GT/s. One application that the consortium has in mind is high-end networking, where the architecture can serve up 128 GB/s of bandwidth operating at full duplex.

The PCIe 4.0 specification still needs to undergo a final IP review, but the PCI-SIG claims that the interconnect is ready to go. Prior to the publication of the spec, the SIG had already been doing compliance testing with a variety of its members, and it claims that a number of 16 GT/s solutions have already been worked out. Perhaps we'll see products using the new spec make their way to shelves sooner than later.

Quote:The PCI Express 3.0 standard has been with us rather longer than anyone intended it to be. The standard was initially finished in 2010, and motherboards supporting it were in-market by 2011. PCI Express 4.0 should have been available by 2013 if the organization had kept to its previous pace, but delays and difficulties associated with the design have left PCIe 4.0 support languishing. Now PCI-SIG has announced that PCIe 4.0 specification is finished — and it plans to have PCIe 5.0 ready to go by 2019.

That’s an accelerated launch window and, given the relatively short window between completing the standard and shipping hardware (typically about 12 months), it’s not clear if PCIe 4.0 will find a huge home in the market. PCIe 5.0, according to the standards body, is coming along quite quickly.
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A quick progression from PCIe 4.0 to 5.0 might result in consumer hardware not shipping PCIe 4.0 for very long, but the 4x bandwidth increase for peripherals and devices would be huge.

Quote:PCI-SIG indicates that PCIe 4.0 will be a short-lived specification because the organization has fast-tracked PCIe 5.0 for final release in 2019.

PCIe 4.0 will bring us 64GBps of throughput, while PCIe 5.0 will double that to 128GBps. Both revisions still leverage the standard 128b/130b encoding scheme that debuted with PCIe 3.0. PCI-SIG representatives said they are satisfied with the 20% reduction in overhead facilitated by the 128b/130b encoding, and further encoding refinements to reduce the current 1.5% overhead are subject to a diminishing point of returns.

Although we have yet to see PCIe 4.0 on the market, the fast-tracked PCIe 5.0 is already on revision 0.3, and the group predicts 0.5 will be available by the 4Q17.

The PCI-SIG defines the specification, but it has no control over when the end devices make it to market. Intel and AMD are the key enablers for the broad desktop market; we certainly won't see PCIe 4.0 GPUs and SSDs without a slot to plug them into. AMD has slated PCIe 4.0 for 2020. We imagine Intel is also chomping at the bit to deploy PCIe 4.0 3D XPoint and NVMe SSDs, but the company remains silent on its timeline.

Quote:PC users will have to wait a little longer for PCI Express 4.0 but IBM has the technology ready to ship. We spotted a Wistron P93D2-2P server code named MiHawk at the Adata booth. The server features PCIe 4.0 with up to 64GB/s to the storage backplane from a Microsemi HBA. 16 SATA/SAS and 8 U.2 NVMe SSD ports divide the bandwidth, a 2x increase from a single PCIe 3.0 x16 HBA.
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While at Computex we learned from PCI-SIG that PCIe 5.0 has moved to 0.7. The 0.7 revision is just one step away from the final release slated for 2019. PCI-SIG has said in the past that PCIe 4.0 will be short lived due to the quick turn around for 5.0 that again doubles bandwidth. It's possible for PC makers to ignore 4.0 and focus resources on implementing 32GT/s per lane in products coming to market in 2020.