back to article Insanely great PCIe 4.0 bit rate locked in

The PCI-SIG has settled on a bit rate for its next-generation PCIe 4.0 interconnect specification, and the winner is – insert drumroll – 16 gigatransfers per second, as expected. "Experts in the PCIe Electrical Workgroup carefully analyzed a number of target bit rates for the next generation of PCIe architecture, taking into …

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  1. Annihilator
    Paris Hilton

    PCIe lanes

    Quite a low stat I reckon. On average I'd say there were at least 12 per motherboard shipped these days.

    1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

      Laptops ?

      And how many lanes does an average laptop have ?

      1. Annihilator
        Boffin

        re: Laptops

        Again, varies, but they have them. Or at least every Centrino since 2006 has them (the wifi cards usually connect via PCIe, and PCIe generally replaced the Northbridge)

  2. Neil 7
    WTF?

    "Forever" and "Who needs more than 640KB RAM"

    Sorry, but is history repeating itself?

    Build a NAS with more than half a dozen SATA2/SATA3 disks and it's quite easy to start pushing PCIe v2 quite hard, even to the point where it can become an IO bottleneck (ie. typical 8-port PCIe x8 SAS HBA).

    PCIe v3 should last a good while, and PCIe v4 that bit longer, but "forever"? I seriously doubt that. Forever is a long time... whatever bandwidth is available we'll find ways to use it all up, and then some.

  3. rlow
    Black Helicopters

    the length of "forever"

    is a finite number. Maybe he knows something we don't.

    Locking my bunker door now.

  4. Spud2go
    Pint

    Enough is NEVER enough.

    "At 8GT/s, PCIe 3.0 is as fast as normal humans will ever need."

    Seem to remember a certain Mr Gates saying something similar with regard to computer memory way back - "640K ought to be enough for anybody"

  5. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
    Boffin

    References, please?

    Gates denies ever saying such a thing, and a quick google turns up no definitive references to when or where he might have said it.

    http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

    http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9101699/The_640K_quote_won_t_go_away_but_did_Gates_really_say_it_

    GJC

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Mike 16

    Transfers?

    What constitutes a "transfer"? It is almost certainly not a transaction, unless 4.0 is logically very different from its predecessors. Perhaps "transitions"? or maybe they mean "signal elements", which we used to call "baud" (max signal elements/sec.) before the PC muppets (no disrespect to Jim Henson) decided that every signal was strictly binary. (Hint: take a look how GigE, or even 100BaseT are done)

    1. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
      Boffin

      Use the force, Luke....

      If you follow the link embedded in the article, there's a very useful definition of exactly what it means. Raw bits per second per channel, in essence, with a 25% overhead for encoding.

      GJC

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Forever...

    actually I agree with him...in a fashion....

    He may be eluding to the fact that by the time we have even gotten close to it, we have moved onto a completly new bus and architecture, therefore, never actually reaching it's limit.

  8. phil dude
    Thumb Up

    but then again...

    I was just at SC11, and we really need faster (lower latency) networks for a whole host of tightly coupled scientific problems. This doesn't sound all bad, if it addresses that issue...

  9. madmath
    Trollface

    So we are part of the 1%...

    ... that owns more than 16 PCI-E lanes, and deny other people access to their fair share of lanes !

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