PCIe4
Latest
Gigabyte's next-gen SSD shows the incredible potential of PCIe 4.0
When AMD launched its third-gen Zen 2-based Ryzen processors, it also introduced the next generation PCIe 4.0 controllers. Now, Gigabyte has launched one of the first PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs that shows the incredible speed potential of the new tech. The AORUS NVMe Gen4 SSD can hit up to 5,000MB/s read speeds and 4,400 MB/s write performance. That's about 56 percent faster read and over double the write speeds of Samsung's 970 EVO, currently one of the fastest NVMe SSDs on the market.
PCIe 4.0 will be twice as fast as today's slots
We've been hearing about a new PCIe specification since 2011. That seems like an eon ago in technology time. PCI-SIG, the community responsible for maintaining these peripheral input/output (I/O) specifications has finally released the specs for PCI Express 4.0, which will give PCs twice the throughput speed (up to 16 GT/s) as previous 3.0 connections while maintaining backward compatibility as well.
PCIe 4.0 inches towards reality, hits 16 gigatransfers per second (that's a thing, right?)
Don't get too excited just yet, but PCIe 4.0 is coming. PCI-SIG, the body that governs the standard, has announced the next evolution of the interface, which should start popping up in servers, desktops, laptops and even tablets around 2015. Sadly, details are pretty slim on the slot -- final specs aren't expected to be announced before 2014. All we know is that PCIe 4.0 will be able to perform 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s), which tells us only slightly more than jack squat. It simply means that a PCIe 4.0 card will be capable of transferring 16 billion discrete chunks of data per second, twice that of PCIe 3.0. What that doesn't tell us though, is the size of those chunks. If they're the same size, 4.0 will provide double the current bit rate of 1 GB/s per-lane. If, for some reason, the channel width were halved there would be no speed increase -- but we seriously doubt that's the case. So, will we be looking at 32 GB/s PCIe 4.0 x16 GPUs in a few years? That is a definite maybe.
