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posted by CoolHand on Thursday August 31 2017, @08:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the expansion-mansion dept.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-4.0-5.0-pci-sig-specfication,35325.html

PCIe is the ubiquitous engine that pulls a big part of the computing locomotive down the track—it touches nearly every device in your computer. As such, it is the linchpin for the development of many other technologies, such as storage, networking, GPUs, chipsets, and many other devices. Considering its importance, it isn't surprising to find the PCI-SIG with 750 members worldwide. Unfortunately, large organizations tend to move slowly, and PCIe 4.0 is undoubtedly late to market. PCIe 3.0 debuted in 2010 within the normal four-year cadence, but PCIe 4.0 isn't projected to land in significant quantities until the end of 2017—a seven-year gap.

PCI-SIG representatives attributed part of the delay to industry stagnation. The PCIe 3.0 interface was sufficient for storage, networking, graphics cards, and other devices, for the first several years after its introduction. Over the last two years, a sudden wellspring of innovation exposed PCIe 3.0's throughput deficiencies. Artificial intelligence craves increased GPU throughput, storage devices are migrating to the PCIe bus with the NVMe protocol, and as a result, networking suddenly has an insatiable appetite for more bandwidth.

The industry needs PCIe 4.0 to land soon, and PCI-SIG assures us it will ratify the new specification by the end of 2017. The sluggish ratification process hasn't hampered adoption entirely, though. Several IP vendors already offer 16GT/s controllers, and many vendors have already implemented PCIe 4.0 PHYs into their next-generation products. These companies are plowing ahead with the 0.9 revision of the specification, whereas the final ratified spec debuts at 1.0. PCI-SIG says it is accelerating the development and feedback processes, along with simplifying early specification revisions, in a bid to reduce time to market for future specifications. 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.

[...] 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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @11:57PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @11:57PM (#562347)

    Why would you buy overpriced pre-spec PCIe 4 gear when PCIe 5 will come out the next year?

    Is somebody being paid off here?

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by forkazoo on Friday September 01 2017, @01:16AM

    by forkazoo (2561) on Friday September 01 2017, @01:16AM (#562372)

    If you need gear, you buy what exists. Maybe PCIe5 will get delayed. Maybe the spec will be on time, but the hardware will be delayed. Maybe the hardware will be on time, but but insanely expensive or unreliable. Meanwhile, while you wait for PCIe5, everybody is doing stuff with their PCIe4 gear.

    Likewise, don't buy software based on a roadmap. Just like hardware, it doesn't matter what amazing things have been promised, because nobody can be sure how the future will play out. If something has enough value, buy it. If something doesn't have enough value, don't buy it. We've been dealing with "Should I wait" questions since people started figuring out better ways to bang rocks together.

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday September 01 2017, @07:25AM

    by RamiK (1813) on Friday September 01 2017, @07:25AM (#562431)

    These advances in memory bandwidth aren't meaningfully beneficial to the general consumers since loading textures is not a bottleneck in games and CAD. They're there for compute and big data who retire hardware every 1-3years.

    --
    compiling...