PCIe 6.0 SSDs for PCs won't arrive until 2030 — costs and complexity mean PCIe 5.0 SSDs are here to stay for some time

According to "news sources" PCI-E 4.0 won't be available until 2028 at the earliest....and pci-e 5 hardware MIGHT be available to enthusiasts by 2030.....

This smacks of saying "just spend money NOW, don't hold onto it". I wonder who would benefit from buying a journalist/reviewer to say this?

PCIe 6.0 SSD should come fast and use 2 lanes instead of four ... we dont have enough lanes from non server grade CPUs...

I'd say PCIe 4.0 arrived about on time. It came to consumer platforms 7 years after PCIe 3.0. NVMe SSDs were just starting to near the limits of PCIe 3.0, as were GPUs.

When PCIe 4.0 hit, it took SSDs more than a year to actually show a decent improvement from using it! Even high-end GPUs using PCIe 4.0 showed maybe a couple % benefit. Even GPUs as powerful as the RTX 4090 were no exception.

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-pci-express-scaling/28.html
When you look at 1% minimums, the assessment doesn't change much. Here's data from their testing of the RTX 5090 on PCIe 5.0:

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-pci-express-scaling/32.html
If you compare the PCIe 4.0 and 3.0 speeds, in that graph, 4.0 is a whopping 2.6% faster that PCIe than 3.0!
: D
I think we can safely say that PCIe 5.0 was not and is not necessary, on consumer machines!

PCIe 4.0 arguably solves the problem of making it viable to use x8 or x4 lanes for a dGPU (depending on the performance tier), either because the manufacturer cut the lane count, or because you want to use another PCIe slot or two. However, we should consider that newer PCIe standards require more silicon die area for the PCIe controller, which makes this reduction of lane count a somewhat self-fulfilling prophesy.

The only reason I think we got PCIe 5.0 as soon as we did is that Intel was feeling butt-hurt from getting spanked by AMD and thought they'd up the ante. It's pure specsmanship. It's funny to me how, until this year, there were no consumer PCIe 5.0 add-in-cards. The only place consumers were using PCIe 5.0 was in the M.2 slots, which Intel ironically didn't even support until Arrow Lake. ...and the irony doesn't stop there, as Arrow Lake has its own PCIe issues!
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-arrow-lake-processors-bottleneck-pcie-5-0-nvme-ssds-by-16-percent-limiting-peak-speeds-to-12gb-s-instead-of-14gb-s
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the only reason RTX 5000 even supports PCIe 5.0 is for AI! And AMD just added it to try and match Nvidia. Neither of them needed it, for gaming purposes.

If we extrapolate from what happened with PCIe 3.0 -> 4.0, I'd say we shouldn't have had PCIe 5.0 until next year. That would push PCIe 6.0 out to 2033. Using the figure of 2030 puts us roughly half-way in between a 7 year follow-on from the actual introduction of PCIe 5.0 and where it should've been. Sounds okay to me.

Then again, it's hard to know exactly what the computing world will look like, in 5 years. Maybe CPUs will all have on-package memory, by then, and CXL memory expansions will be all the rage. That would create a new need for faster PCIe/CXL speeds, and PCIe 6.0 / CXL 3.0 would be the antidote. It'll be interesting to watch.

newtechldtech said:

PCIe 6.0 SSD should come fast and use 2 lanes instead of four ... we dont have enough lanes from non server grade CPUs...

IMO, the only thing they need to upgrade is the PCIe speed between the CPU and chipset. Right now, it's 4.0 for both Intel and AMD, though Intel uses x8 and AMD uses only x4. So, AMD needs to do this more than Intel, but I wouldn't mind seeing them both do it, since it's the one place where PCIe 5.0 could have the greatest impact, today.

With dGPUs using ever greater amounts of power, it's actually kind of hard to find a dGPU that uses only 2 slots. From what I've seen, most of them use at least 2.5 slots, at the midrange tier and above. So, you don't even have very many PCIe slots available, in a decently-powered desktop. Go ahead and run your dGPU at PCIe 5.0 x8 (you'll never notice the difference!). That will give you another x8 or two x4 slots that are CPU-connected. Then, if the chipset is PCIe 5.0-connected, that's enough for anything else you'd care to plug in.

Also, don't forget the "sticker shock" people had over motherboard prices, when PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 first hit the market. As the article says, PCIe 6.0 is going to ratchet up board costs yet again. Pushing higher data rates isn't free, at this point. The need for better signal-to-noise ratios will require more PCB layers and more expensive materials. Node shrinks won't nullify this, either.