PCI Express 4.0 to arrive in 2017, will double the bandwidth

It's been six years since the introduction of PCI Express 3.0 so the PCI-SIG group is getting excited about introduction the next generation. A roadmap shown at the Intel Developer Forum reveals PCI Express 4.0 will make its debut next year, this new interface will double the datarate to 16GT/s.

For the consumer graphics card market, this isn't really necessary yet as the performance difference between PCIe x16 2.0 and PCIe x16 3.0 is minimal even with high-end video cards, but it is a very welcome upgrade for the network and storage markets.

The roadmap shows PCI-SIG is also thinking about PCI Express 5.0, but that standard probably won't arrive until the early 2020s or even later. With PCI Express 4.0 getting close to the limits for copper links, it's believed that PCI Express 5.0 will have to adopt optical links.



German tech site Heise spotted a ConnectX-5 1000 GB/s Adapter with PCIe 4.0 x16 support at the Intel Developer Forum:



Source: VideoCardz