PCI-SIG officially releases PCI Express 6.0 specification
The PCI-SIG started work on the PCIe 6.0 specification in June 2019. After two years and seven months, the PCI-SIG officially released the PCI Express 6.0 specification to its members in January 2022. The new specification comes less than three years after the release of the PCIe 5.0 specification, and also delivers on the PCI-SIG’s promise to double the bandwidth with each new PCIe specification release.
The release of the PCIe 6.0 specification will benefit data-intensive markets such as high-performance computing (HPC), data centers, edge computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), automotive, Internet of Things (IoT), and aerospace…, and further strengthen PCI Express as a high-speed interconnect interface.
The main advantages of the PCIe 6.0 specification are:
- 64 GT/s raw data rate and up to 256 GB/s via x16 configuration
- Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels (PAM4) signaling, levraging existing PAM4 already available in the industry
- Lightweight Forward Error Correct (FEC) and Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) mitigate the bit error rate increase associated with PAM4 signaling
- Flit (flow control unit) based encoding supports PAM4 modulation and works in conjunction with the FEC and CRC to enable double the bandwidth gain
- Updated Packet layout used in Flit Mode to provide additional functionality and simplify processing
- Maintains backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology
Products that support the PCIe 6.0 specification will likely not be available until late 2023 or sometime in 2024. This can refer to the previous PCIe 5.0 specification. The PCI-SIG announced the final version of the PCIe 5.0 specification at the end of May 2019. In fact, the first products supporting this technology will not appear until the end of 2021.
