The bidirectional 256GB/s PCIe 6.0 standard is finalized

PCI Express 5.0 is just beginning to make its way to consumers, but the PCIe 6.0 specifications have just been finalized. PCI Special Interest group has announced the final specifications for PCIe 6.0, which doubles the bandwidth of version 5.0, with a theoretical maximum bidirectional speed of 256GBps on x16 slots (128GBps in a single direction).

The first ultra-fast PCIe 5.0 SSD came just before this year's Consumer Electronics Show, promising read speeds of up to 14GBps. That's already twice as much as we've seen on PCIe 4.0 hard drives, and with PCIe 6.0 doubling, we expect to see SSDs deliver speeds of up to 28GBps in the future.

PCIe 6.0 vs. existing PCIe specifications

Since the specification was first introduced in 2003, PCI Special Interest group has doubled the speed of PCI Express, roughly every three years. PCIe 6.0 has overhauled signaling technology to achieve this bandwidth boost while maintaining low latency. Anandtech described the move as "a more important overhaul, arguably the largest in the history of the standard."

The PCIe 6.0 architecture also maintains compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe. This will allow any existing hardware using the earlier specs to work in PCIe 6.0 hosts, which will certainly help with the adoption and transition to this new spec.

While PCIe 5.0 is still in its infancy and is being demonstrated with enterprise-class SSDs, we shouldn't expect to see PCIe 6.0 hardware in 12 to 18 months. This means that some servers may start using the new specifications sometime in 2023, with consumer hardware to follow in 2024 or 2025. Until then, get ready to hear more about PCIe 5.0 SSDs, GPUs, and more in 2022.

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