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