PCI Express Bandwidth to Be Doubled Again: PCIe 6.0 Announced, Spec to Land in 2021
by Ryan Smith on June 18, 2019 5:00 PM ESTWhen the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) first announced PCIe 4.0 a few years back, the group made it clear that they were not just going to make up for lost time after PCIe 3.0, but that they were going to accelerate their development schedule to beat their old cadence. Since then the group has launched the final versions of the 4.0 and 5.0 specifications, and now with 5.0 only weeks old, the group is announcing today that they are already hard at work on the next version of the PCIe specification, PCIe 6.0. True to PCIe development iteration, the forthcoming standard will once again double the bandwidth of a PCIe slot – a x16 slot will now be able to hit a staggering 128GB/sec – with the group expecting to finalize the standard in 2021.
As with the PCIe iterations before it, the impetus for PCIe 6.0 is simple: hardware vendors are always in need of more bandwidth, and the PCI-SIG is looking to stay ahead of the curve by providing timely increases in bandwidth. Furthermore in the last few years their efforts have taken on an increased level of importance as well, as other major interconnect standards are building off of PCIe. CCIX, Intel’s CXL, and other interfaces have all extended PCIe, and will in turn benefit from PCIe improvements. So PCIe speed boosts serve as the core of building ever-faster (and more interconnected) systems.
PCIe 6.0, in turn, is easily the most important/most disruptive update to the PCIe standard since PCIe 3.0 almost a decade ago. To be sure, PCIe 6.0 remains backwards compatible with the 5 versions that have preceded it, and PCIe slots aren’t going anywhere. But with PCIe 4.0 & 5.0 already resulting in very tight signal requirements that have resulted in ever shorter trace length limits, simply doubling the transfer rate yet again isn’t necessarily the best way to go. Instead, the PCI-SIG is going to upend the signaling technology entirely, moving from the Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ) tech used since the beginning, and to Pulse-Amplitude Modulation 4 (PAM4).
At a very high level, what PAM4 does versus NRZ is to take a page from the MLC NAND playbook, and double the number of electrical states a single cell (or in this case, transmission) will hold. Rather than traditional 0/1 high/low signaling, PAM4 uses 4 signal levels, so that a signal can encode for four possible two-bit patterns: 00/01/10/11. This allows PAM4 to carry twice as much data as NRZ without having to double the transmission bandwidth, which for PCIe 6.0 would have resulted in a frequency around 30GHz(!).
NRZ vs. PAM4 (Base Diagram Courtesy Intel)
PAM4 itself is not a new technology, but up until now it’s been the domain of ultra-high-end networking standards like 200G Ethernet, where the amount of space available for more physical channels is even more limited. As a result, the industry already has a few years of experience working with the signaling standard, and with their own bandwidth needs continuing to grow, the PCI-SIG has decided to bring it inside the chassis by basing the next generation of PCIe upon it.
The tradeoff for using PAM4 is of course cost. Even with its greater bandwidth per Hz, PAM4 currently costs more to implement at pretty much every level, from the PHY to the physical layer. Which is why it hasn’t taken the world by storm, and why NRZ continues to be used elsewhere. The sheer mass deployment scale of PCIe will of course help a lot here – economies of scale still count for a lot – but it will be interesting to see where things stand in a few years once PCIe 6.0 is in the middle of ramping up.
Meanwhile, not unlike the MLC NAND in my earlier analogy, because of the additional signal states a PAM4 signal itself is more fragile than a NRZ signal. And this means that along with PAM4, for the first time in PCIe’s history the standard is also getting Forward Error Correction (FEC). Living up to its name, Forward Error Correction is a means of correcting signal errors in a link by supplying a constant stream of error correction data, and it’s already commonly used in situations where data integrity is critical and there’s no time for a retransmission (such as DisplayPort 1.4 w/DSC). While FEC hasn’t been necessary for PCIe until now, PAM4’s fragility is going to change that. The inclusion of FEC shouldn’t make a noticeable difference to end-users, but for the PCI-SIG it’s another design requirement to contend with. In particular, the group needs to make sure that their FEC implementation is low-latency while still being appropriately robust, as PCIe users won’t want a significant increase in PCIe’s latency.
The upshot of the switch to PAM4 then is that by increasing the amount of data transmitted without increasing the frequency, the signal loss requirements won’t go up. PCIe 6.0 will have the same 36dB loss as PCIe 5.0, meaning that while trace lengths aren’t officially defined by the standard, a PCIe 6.0 link should be able to reach just as far as a PCIe 5.0 link. Which, coming from PCIe 5.0, is no doubt a relief to vendors and engineers alike.
Even with these changes, however, as previously mentioned PCIe 6.0 is fully backwards compatible with earlier standards, and this will go for both hosts and peripherals. This means that to a certain extent, hardware designers are essentially going to be implementing PCIe twice: once for NRZ, and again for PAM4. This will be handled at the PHY level, and while it’s not a true doubling of logic (what is NRZ but PAM4 with half as many signal levels?), it does mean that backwards compatibility is a bit more work this time around. Though discussing the matter in today’s press conference, it doesn’t sound like the PCI-SIG is terribly concerned about the challenges there, as PHY designers have proven quite capable (e.g. Ethernet).
PCI Express Bandwidth (Full Duplex) |
||||||||
Slot Width | PCIe 1.0 (2003) |
PCIe 2.0 (2007) |
PCIe 3.0 (2010) |
PCIe 4.0 (2017) |
PCIe 5.0 (2019) |
PCIe 6.0 (2021) |
||
x1 | 0.25GB/sec | 0.5GB/sec | ~1GB/sec | ~2GB/sec | ~4GB/sec | ~8GB/sec | ||
x2 | 0.5GB/sec | 1GB/sec | ~2GB/sec | ~4GB/sec | ~8GB/sec | ~16GB/sec | ||
x4 | 1GB/sec | 2GB/sec | ~4GB/sec | ~8GB/sec | ~16GB/sec | ~32GB/sec | ||
x8 | 2GB/sec | 4GB/sec | ~8GB/sec | ~16GB/sec | ~32GB/sec | ~64GB/sec | ||
x16 | 4GB/sec | 8GB/sec | ~16GB/sec | ~32GB/sec | ~64GB/sec | ~128GB/sec |
Putting all of this in practical terms then, PCIe 6.0 will be able to reach anywhere between ~8GB/sec for a x1 slot up to ~128GB/sec for a x16 slot (e.g. accelerator/video card). For comparison’s sake, 8GB/sec is as much bandwidth as a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, so over the last decade and a half, the number of lanes required to deliver that kind of bandwidth has been cut to 1/16th the original amount.
Overall, the PCI-SIG has set a rather aggressive schedule for this standard: the group has already been working on it, and would like to finalize the standard in 2021, two years from now. This would mean that the PCI-SIG will have improved PCIe’s bandwidth by eight-fold in a five-year period, going from PCIe 3.0 and its 8 GT/sec rate in 2016 to 4.0 and 16 GT/sec in 2017, 5.0 and 32 GT/sec in 2019, and finally 6.0 and 64 GT/sec in 2021. Which would be roughly half the time it has taken to get a similar increase going from PCIe 1.0 to 4.0.
As for end users and general availability of PCIe 6.0 products, while the PCI-SIG officially defers to the hardware vendors here, the launch cycles of PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 have been very similar, so PCIe 6.0 will likely follow in those same footsteps. 4.0, which was finalized in 2017, is just now showing up in mass market hardware in 2019, and meanwhile Intel has already committed to PCIe 5.0-capable CPUs in 2021. So we may see PCIe 6.0 hardware as soon as 2023, assuming development stays on track and hardware vendors move just as quickly to implement it as they have on earlier standards. Though for client/consumer use, it bears pointing out that with the rapid development pace for PCIe – and the higher costs that PAM4 will incur – just because the PCI-SIG develops 6.0 it doesn't mean it will show up in client decides any time soon; economics and bandwidth needs will drive that decision.
Speaking of which, as part of today’s press conference the group also gave a quick update on PCIe compliance testing and hardware rollouts. PCIe 4.0 compliance testing will finally kick off in August of this year, which should further accelerate 4.0 adoption and hardware support. Meanwhile PCIe 5.0 compliance testing is still under development, and like 4.0, once 5.0 compliance testing becomes available it should open the flood gates to much faster adoption there as well.
Source: PCI-SIG
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Luffy1piece - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
Haha wordballsystemlord - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
Don't worry, Intel will support PCIe 5.0 on their 14nm+++++++++ process. :Dhalcyon - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
in 2022 .... 2 or 22 or 222. Add as many years as you want. It'll be a 2 anyway.Really, I lost ALL hope on Intel roadmaps years ago.
Luffy1piece - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
Shift to Gen-Z already!It's good to have options, but for now the industry should shift to Gen-Z: 200+ GB/s bandwidth available now, with future updates up to 400+ GB/s. Also it has <100 ns latency, compared to the 700 something ns latency of PCIe I'm aware of. Best of all it breaks the fixed CPU-memory structure of 1 CPU only capable of a certain DDR version RAM. This will allow us to upgrade and use a mix of NVRAM/persistent memory/SCM as they become available in the next few years; some of which have the potential to provide RAM-like bandwidth and latency or better with SSD-like non-volatile capacity. Single thread performance is anyway just growing at around 3% YoY, so I see these new memories to be the only big performance upgrade in next few years.
Of course I don't expect Intel to give us Gen-Z coz it wants to push their own memory products(3D Xpoint) and connectivity solutions like CXL(using PCIe) and it will be leveraging its majority market share to do so. Thus my hope is from AMD. It's about time we get some healthy competition in CPU market and let us consumers benefit from latest technology, instead of monopolies manipulating markets to maximize their profit and use old tech. Also can't wait to use an 8K monitor directly with a laptop.
TeXWiller - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
I haven't heard Gen-Z having a solution for coherence yet. This is why the shorter range interconnects are still needed also. I too would like an industry wide applicable, ultra high-speed standard interconnect to emerge so that we could make those plug-and-play "mainframes" by just throwing boxes of processing, storage/memory and everything else together.Luffy1piece - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link
This what I found on http://genzconsortium.org/faqs/Does Gen-Z support cache coherency?
Yes. Gen-Z supports cache coherency in point-to-point, meshed, and switch-based topologies. Cache coherency can be used between processors with accelerators, accelerators with accelerators, or accelerators with memory and storage.
TeXWiller - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Thanks. Things change so fast these days. You blink and your incoherent neighbor's children are all coherent and well-behaved. ;)As soon as I saw those 2x10Gb ports in the new Mac Pro, I started to think about clustering. Apple, give the generation z what it deserves and implement Gen-Z for connecting those petabyte flash storage boxes and additional Macs for the cases when one Xeon with GPUs just doesn't cut it. You already have the rack model, after all.
mode_13h - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
It's using an Intel CPU. It doesn't seem to me like Gen-Z would work particularly well as a bolt-on to PCIe.Maybe, when Apple finally brings their own ARM cores to the desktop, Gen-Z will figure into their plans.
Targon - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
PCI Express would hang off the Gen-Z bus, so the system as a whole could be Gen-Z and still have PCI Express slots. Bandwidth/lanes to each slot would be dynamic as needed, so you could have every slot get 16 lanes.mode_13h - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
It'd be quite a feat for Apple to wrangle such a mod from Intel. That's all I'm sayin'.