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WHEN YOU ACTUALLY EXAMINE how industry standards for connectivity and hardware performance evolve over time, it’s surprising how quickly the new normal gets adopted by the masses. USB-A was the dominant form of physical port connectivity across the hardware spectrum for years, but mobile devices ran through a flurry of alternate compact ports before settling on the USB-C connector we know and love.
It’s strange to think that in a few short years, the top-tier hardware we feature here in 2021’s issues of Maximum PC will be heavily outdated, even obsolete. The industry moves fast. When a new gold standard for any aspect of our systems arrives, it doesn’t take long before every new product conforms to the norm. PCIe 4.0 SSDs were hailed as a revolution when they first arrived, exclusive to AMD systems, but Intel has since climbed aboard and heavy hitters such as Samsung have pushed the medium to further heights than the first wave of Gen4 drives could ever reach.
But what comes next? There are plenty of upgrades already in the works, from the next generation of PCIe technology to new DDR5 desktop memory. We’re going to analyze where the industry is going next, how soon it’s going to get there, and what you can do to make yourself and your hardware as ready as possible.
WE’LL START WITH PCIE, or ‘Peripheral Component Interconnect Express’. A bus standard that is commonly found as an interface on motherboards, PCIe connections support a wide variety of components, such as GPUs, SSDs, and Ethernet adapters. The electrical interface provided by the PCIe specification supports other existing standards within the PC hardware industry, including SATA and M.2.
PCIe specifications are developed by the PCI Special Interest Group, a consortium of over 900 tech companies with a vested interest in the technology. The standard is currently in its fourth iteration, although it replaced the original PCI bus standard, which went through five full revisions itself (from PCI 1.0 through to PCI-X 2.0). These standards are constantly evolving; PCIe may birth an entirely new bus format in the not-too-distant future.
For now, we know what to expect from upcoming versions. The specifications for PCIe 5.0 were finalized and released by the PCI-SIG in May 2019, after two years of internal research and development. Preliminary specs for PCIe 6.0 were announced just three weeks later, but this is still in the early testing phase. PCIe 5.0, on the other hand, has already entered production.
In late 2019, Chinese company Jiangsu Huacun Electronic Technology revealed the world’s first PCIe 5.0 controller, named the HC9001. Chip manufacturer Rambus announced the completion of a PCIe 5.0 interface in 2020, with others following suit. These technologies are not yet available for use in conventional computer systems, but they aren’t far off. AMD stated last year that it expects to have PCIe 5.0 compatibility baked into its 5nm Zen 4 processor architecture, with compatible drives arriving for consumers in 2022.
PCIe 5.0 tech is already poised to take over a number of enterprise sectors, from cloud computing to supercomputers. NAND flash controller producer Silicon Motion isn’t quite as optimistic as AMD, saying it expects enterprise-grade SSDs to be available in 2022, with consumer models a little further down the line. Marvell announced earlier this year that it has completed its first PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers under the Bravera product line, which are capable of up to 14GB/s read and 9GB/s write.
If you think ‘that’s much faster than I need!’, you’re probably right. PCIe 5.0 drives will be monstrously fast, but Gen4 SSDs are already nippy.
Speed Demons