PCI Express 4.0

[dex3108]

The next generation of the PCIe interconnect is going to tidy up your gaming rig’s innards by delivering at least 300W of power through the socket alone.

The group behind creating and finalising future PCI standards, the PCI-SIG (or Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group to give them their full, tongue-twisting title), held sessions at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco last week, detailing the next step for PCI Express.

The previous iterations of the connection have prepared us for an expected doubling of available bandwidth across the interface. From PCIe 1.0 we’ve seen an effective doubling of peak bandwidth from each successive generation - starting at 250MB/s for a x1 connection and moving up to a little under 2GB’s for PCIe 4.0. That means for a full x16 socket then your PCIe 4.0 GPU is going to have a total of 31.508GB/s of available bandwidth at its disposal.

While those are pretty numbers for the numerologically-obsessed the ones that have really got my attention have come from a report on Tom’s Hardware. They spoke to Richard Solomon, vice president of the PCI-SIG, about the potential power delivery from the new PCIe 4.0 slots: off the top of his head he couldn’t give the final proposed upper limit for socket power, but said the minimum would be at least 300W. He also stated that members of the PCI-SIG had suggested several options and that maybe even 400W or 500W could be possible from a single PCIe 4.0 socket.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/pcie-4-release-date