Fancy yourself a PC builder? Or, curious about the standard behind the internal SSDs you can now whack in your Sony console? PCIe 6.0 is at the cutting edge of the PCIe standard. These are the basics.
When it comes to building a PC, there’s a whole bunch of buzzwords and acronyms to get familiar with and that’s just the parts themselves, before even delving into specific standards and sizes.
As such, we here at Trusted Reviews have a bunch of explainers to help you get familiar with them. They include a guide to the overall PCIe standard if you need an introduction to that before taking a peek at this guide to the version coming to hardware in 2024. Let’s get into PCIe 6.0.
What is PCIe 6.0?
PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect articulate) 6.0 is a motherboard connectivity standard for components such as SSDs, Wi-Fi adapters, Ethernet adapters, graphics cards and more. It was announced in 2019 but it is set to debut across hardware in 2024.
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The body behind the standard, the PCI Special Interest Group, aims to see the speeds of PCIe specifications double with each generation and that looks to once again be the case with PCIe 6.0. PCIe offers different speeds depending on how many lanes are in use, and this differs depending on the component. For example, many graphics cards typically use PCIe x16, which is 16 lanes.
For PCIe 6.0, the specification is set to offer 16GB/s for x1 lane, 32GB/s for x2, 64GB/s for x4, 128GB/s for x6 and 256GB/s for x16. This matches the group’s target of doubling the previous standard, with PCIe 5.0 offering half these speeds.
To accomplish the doubling in speeds this time around, the PCI Special Interest Group has overseen a significant overhaul of the underlying signalling method of PCIe (via Anandtech). This allows the bandwidth to greatly boost while still offering low latency.
Despite PCIe 6.0 being set to become available across some products in 2024, PCIe 4.0 remains the most widespread standard, with PCIe 5.0 still not yet fully adopted. PCIe 7.0 has also already been announced, with that next-generation standard having been revealed in 2022, with 2027 expected to be the year where it will debut on hardware.
