PCIe 6 devices not until 2030

[AGTDenton]

No real surprise, I'm still happy with 3.0 and 4.0

"You will not see any PCIe Gen6 [solutions] until 2030," Kuo said. "PC OEMs have very little interest in PCIe 6.0 right now — they do not even want to talk about it. AMD and Intel do not want to talk about it."

Costs and the lack of interoperability tests by PCI-SIG (for now) are among the significant reasons behind not adopting the PCIe 6.0 interface for the client PC market.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-compone ... -some-time

[Saracen]

No real surprise, I'm still happy with 3.0 and 4.0

Me too.

I think we're at that point of the 'innovation' curve that it's getting harder and harder to justify (to ourselves) either the cost or the upheaval.

I mean, think about CPUs. The days where you could overclock a CPU and get a really meaningful peformance boost, the days of cutting little copper links on the CPU (or making them) to "unlock" this or that. Compare that to today where, personally, I can't be bothered to even start tweaking voltages, and rarely bother with BIOS settings, other than to check/set maybe the right RAM profile. Once.

In terms of my actual, real-world, day-to-day computing experience, just how much difference is 6.0 v 5.0, and what will it let me do than I can't, right now?

I'm sure there are still situations where power users might be willing to throw large sums of money at it, like large video rendering projects, very large compiles or whatever. But for consumers? But, that'll be the exception, IMHO, even among enthusiasts like those on a forum like this, and Joe Public is more likely to say "PCIe what-now??"

It's like DPI in printers, resolution in camera sensors, etc - after a certain point, it becomes little more than marketing BS.

[DancesWithUnix]

In terms of my actual, real-world, day-to-day computing experience, just how much difference is 6.0 v 5.0, and what will it let me do than I can't, right now?

I think there is one way in which this could make a difference for a subset of PC users, though for people reading this it is more likely a thing.

I'm still on a PCIe 3 system here (motherboard limit, the CPU can do PCIe 4). It's fine from a performance point of view, and I'm eyeing up an RX 9060 XT 16GB where I think I will still be fine for performance. But...

I can't plug anything more into my PC.

So, that PCIe3 x16 slot that I have is roughly equivalent to:

PCIe4 x8
PCIe5 x4
PCie6 x2

So my x8 10GbE Broadcom network card and the x4 BlackMagic video grabber won't need so many lanes for future versions and in a world where consumer CPUs have limited lanes coming out of them I might get more I/O flexibility.

As it is, I believe my video card is currently running in x8 rather than x16 as I have the x8 slot populated. With two NVMe cards plugged in there are various SATA and PCIe slots disabled to give me the 8 lanes they require. Modern motherboards are a mess of plug that in and something else won't work.

OFC the vast majority of PC users don't plug things in and therefore don't care. Heck, most have laptops where you can't plug things in unless it is USB.

[AGTDenton]

We've definitely gone backwards with PCIe lanes, I specifically had to choose my current motherboard because it had the PCIe layout & configuration that allowed me to have a GPU and Soundcard.
I had to consider physical position of the 1 available slot that didn't share it's resources with something else or be overlapped by the GPU.

Kind of crazy to think we used to have GPU, soundcard, network adapter, decoder, storage and others... now we're lucky to be able to utilise 2 slots...

I loved my x58 board for that reason, all slots were available 100% of the time, didn't share with anything else.
If money allowed, I'd move to Threadripper!

[Saracen]

I hear you, re: lanes, DwU. I'm still musing about a new PC and one question was exactly that. I decided on the X890E chipset for pretty much that reason, despite the higher price, BUT, even then, it's tricky, because different manufacturers have a habit of implementing it differently, so even with more lanes, you won't get the most of everything without limiting something else (among GPU, SSD lanes, number and version of USB etc). It makes for a complicated decision matrix. And me 'edd 'urts.

[Saracen]

...

Kind of crazy to think we used to have GPU, soundcard, network adapter, decoder, storage and others... now we're lucky to be able to utilise 2 slots...
...

True enough, but quite a lot (nearly all) of that functionality has moved on-board to the mobo itself, not via plug-in cards. Even wanting a soundcard a sign of a specifiic requirement. In my case, I offbosard that entirely, via USB, either to external audio interface (MOTU M4) or external DA/Amp for playback (Chord Mojo 2). But it does very much depend on what you're doing. But LAN, Wifi etc? All on-mobo ... usually. And using some of those lanes.

[Unmanned]

It's like faffing over IRQ assignments all over again!

[Saracen]

Oh, that brings back memories. Funny though, in a way, it was almost fun. A right PITA too, but a challenge. That, and QEMM.

[kalniel]

Feels like we're going backwards with SATA ports as well - I don't want to have to get an EATX board (and probable new case) just to keep hard drive flexibility (and support such ancient things as CD/DVD/Blu-ray player). Then again maybe I'm odd in keeping a random mix of HDD and SSDs. I should probably bite the NAS bullet. Maybe when 8TB SSDs are dirt cheap.

[AGTDenton]

For my servers I gave up using onboard SATA. I buy either a HBA or RAID card that has 8 ports. And once that is full I can buy another without issue.
There's usually good deals to be had on used enterprise hardware. I'm eyeing up a 16 port but they've not fallen to an acceptable price point yet.