The first PCIe 5.0 SSDs for consumers just arrived earlier this year, immediately following the launch of PCIe capable AMD Ryzen 7000 and Intel 13th-generation CPUs. But PCI-SIG, the consortium behind PCIe, already has its sights set on PCIe 6.0. Although PCIe 6.0 is complete on a design level, no PCIe 6.0 devices have yet come out, but in its latest presentation, PCI-SIG says the next-generation data link should start showing up in real devices starting in March 2024.
PCI-SIG has always sought to double bandwidth with every new generation of PCIe, and PCIe 6.0 is no different. A 16 lane PCIe 6.0 slot (the kind you’d plug a graphics card into, and the largest size for most devices) will be able to transfer 128 gigabytes per second in each direction; for reference, many lower-end graphics cards have that much bandwidth for VRAM, and PCIe has never before been this close to rivaling graphics memory like this.
PCIe 6.0, much like PCIe 5.0, is going to matter primarily for SSDs. The typical SSD only uses four lanes via the NVMe interface, so a PCIe 5.0 SSD only has 16GB/s worth of bandwidth, while a PCIe 6.0 SSD will have 32GB/s. Storage technology will need to be improved in order to take advantage of all this extra bandwidth, but given enough time for R&D, it’s likely we’ll see SSDs hitting 32GB/s in a few years from now.
Additionally, PCI-SIG is nearing completion on the technical details of PCIe 7.0. Its design specifications will be completed in 2025, and devices should start coming out sometime in 2027. PCIe 7.0 will of course come with another doubling of bandwidth, this time to 256GB/s, and it’s hard to imagine what kind of device could possibly need that much data in a single second. Then again, it was only four years ago that 8GB/s on a PCIe 4.0 SSD seemed insane, and now you can buy a top-end PCIe 4.0 drive for about $100.