PCI Express 4.0 Brings 16 GT/s And At Least 300 Watts At The Slot

[It's me!]

I can imagine a future without PCIe cables!!

Quote

The next iteration of PCI Express will double the bandwidth per lane, but that shouldn't surprise anyone. During Intel Developers Forum, we sat down with Richard Solomon, Vice President of PCI-SIG, and found the hidden gem in the next specification; it provides at least a 4x increase in power delivery at the slot, which might eliminate the need for auxiliary power cables with some GPUs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-4.0-power-speed-express,32525.html

[Arty]

check before posting 

 

 

 

[samcool55]

...how are you suppose to handle flippin 300W to the pci-e connector?

I guess the only way is to connect PEG plugs to the motherboard which doesn't make sense because you can plug them into the GPU if you need it anyway...

[It's me!]

4 minutes ago, Arty said:

check before posting 

 

 

 

That doesn't list the power spec, this story is about the power. 

[Morgan MLGman]

25 minutes ago, Thread212 said:

even if its really can give u 16gt/s
i dont think there's any available gpu that can saturate all that bandwidth.
like we have to wait 5 more years?

Even PCI-E 2.0 x8 is enough for current GPUs... This will only be a marketing thing, as it won't matter whether it's gonna be PCI-E 3.0 or 4.0 on the motherboard, same as it doesn't matter whether your motherboard has a 2.0 x16 slot or a 3.0 x16 slot as there's no performance impact even on the most bandwidth-hungry cards

[Morgan MLGman]

1 minute ago, Thread212 said:

Yep even those airplane POWER HUNGRY amd fury x...
 

They are not power hungry... Fury X draws around the same amount of power as a GTX 980Ti, and I'm yet to see someone call a 980Ti a "power-hungry" card. Besides, this isn't about power, this is about bandwidth.

[Morgan MLGman]

Just now, Thread212 said:

i am not gonna pay the electric bill with 750 watts radeon r9 fury x on my Rig..Nope.
Enthusiast are just too damn rich.

Haha, listen: This myth of "Radeon GPUs will make your PC a heater and will make you pay tons of money for electricity" is only a myth, it isn't a real issue.

 

A system with a 980Ti draws around 385 Watts under full load, respectively a system with a Fury X draws around 400 Watts. 15 Watts under full-load scenario only is a negligible difference. At idle, those cards draw the same. Also, a Fury X is a cooler card in general, because it's got stock watercooler on it.

[MEC-777]

300w, damn. I'm guessing they will add 2x 8-pin PCIe PSU connectors to the motherboard. That's going to be the only way to get that much power to the slot safely. That or they will have to create new standard power connectors for the boards... 

 

Aren't the most high-end cards today still barely even maxing out PCIe 2.0 x16 slots though? We're nowhere near saturating PCIe 3.0 slots even... 

[Morgan MLGman]

4 minutes ago, Thread212 said:

 u are right.. i have checked from guru3d.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review,10.html

its only draw less than 300 watts at 100% load. but its just for the GPU. not the entire system.

Yeah ^^ You know, it's 2016, Radeon GPUs are good now

[ThinkWithPortals]

8 minutes ago, Thread212 said:

 u are right.. i have checked from guru3d.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review,10.html

its only draw less than 300 watts at 100% load. but its just for the GPU. not the entire system.

Exactly. The whole PC could run off a 500W PSU, no problem. Don't spread misinformation.

[NumLock21]

53 minutes ago, Thread212 said:

even if its really can give u 16gt/s
i dont think there's any available gpu that can saturate all that bandwidth.
like we have to wait 5 more years?

History just repeats itself

[DocSwag]

If AMD had made the rx 480 pcie 4.0, then they wouldn't have had any problems with too much power draw from the mobo!  

[79wjd]

35 minutes ago, Thread212 said:

i am not gonna pay the electric bill with 750 watts radeon r9 fury x on my Rig..Nope.
Enthusiast are just too damn rich.

Yeah, they're loaded because they can afford an extra $50/year electricity bill. 

 

Let's assume the system is used at full load for 4 hours a day 365 days a year (which is pretty fair/generous assumption). Now the average electricity cost is $0.13/kw/h. So, 365days/yr * 4hrs/day = 1460 hours. A Fury X based system pulls about 400w at full load ( http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU16/1533 ). So a system with two Fury X's should be around 650w~. Now assume the PSU has a 90% efficiency, and your power consumption under load is about 720w. So math time: 

720w * 1460 hrs * $0.13kw/hrs / 1000 = $136/year.

 

Now if we were to use a two 980Ti, then it would be 40w~ less, which would be $129/year. 

 

Or if you were to use a single GTX 1060, then it would be 300w~, which would be $57/year. 

 

So yeah, enthusiasts must be loaded because they can afford to spend an extra 10 hours worth of minimum wage a YEAR. Also, anyone who would buy AMD anything must be a moron...I mean, $7/year is really bank breaking stuff. 

[Coaxialgamer]

1 hour ago, Thread212 said:

even if its really can give u 16gt/s
i dont think there's any available gpu that can saturate all that bandwidth.
like we have to wait 5 more years?

gpu's are not the only expansion cards out there ... Pcie ssd's etc need more. And pcie bandwith is a limiting factor in servers.

[manikyath]

50 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Even PCI-E 2.0 x8 is enough for current GPUs... This will only be a marketing thing, as it won't matter whether it's gonna be PCI-E 3.0 or 4.0 on the motherboard, same as it doesn't matter whether your motherboard has a 2.0 x16 slot or a 3.0 x16 slot as there's no performance impact even on the most bandwidth-hungry cards

well, i imagine it'd be more so for pci-e SSDs not requiring an x4 slot anymore.

 

and the article also mentions 4x the power available at the slot, which to me can only mean disaster waiting to happen.

 

at 12 volts, the "old" 75 watt standard crudely divides into 6A, which is honestly still manageable.

at 12 volts... the "4x the power" turns into 24A from the slot, by which i should mention we're basicly touching the very limits of the wire thickness your house is wired with, let alone a PCB.

 

also a thing to note: if we have 4-way CF motherboards, does that mean the mobo needs to support a power draw of 1200 watts? or do all the slots share power? how will we handle the stupid amount of voltage drop in the cables/traces at such a current? (which by the way, you only have a few ohms to play with before you drop out of spec)

 

and most of all, will this mean we will now need a 300 watt headroom in our power supplies "just in case"?

[79wjd]

6 minutes ago, Thread212 said:

 

 

And? PEAK power consumption is 294w on just the card. They also were very clear that peak is NOT the same as average...and what, is Anandtech not a reliable source? Anandtech puts the total system draw at 410w, which falls in line with Guru3D's estimation. So again, the power draw and the electric bills aren't what you're making them out to be. 

 

At peak, a 6700k only draws 130w~ while a 5960x draws 180w~. ( http://techreport.com/review/28751/intel-core-i7-6700k-skylake-processor-reviewed/5 )

 

And Anadtech's estimates are using Haswell-E, not Skylake or regular Haswell. 

[Coaxialgamer]

3 minutes ago, Thread212 said:

But..i was talking about GPU.. 
m2 has reach 32Gb/s .. and how can u saturate all that bandwidth with m2 ssd?

in the near future we will start seeing 3d xpoint , samsung PRAM etc . If they use pcie , they will need more bandwith than what pcie 3.0 can provide

[patrickjp93]

2 hours ago, Thread212 said:

even if its really can give u 16gt/s
i dont think there's any available gpu that can saturate all that bandwidth.
like we have to wait 5 more years?

There are plenty. The thing is you have to be under a heterogeneous workload to do it. Games aren't moving a ton of data back and forth. Compute servers are. This still is nowhere near the 80GB/s Nvidia is bringing with NVLink or the 100GB/s Intel is bringing with Omnipath.

[LucidMew]

Maybe now buying a top tier mobo will be important to overclocking your GPU? And having auxiliary/supplementary power to the board might actually become standard, as opposed to the niche thing that it is now.

[AresKrieger]

Still rather pointless for consumers generally, I guess you could use it to make more plug-less cards however I don't really see much of a point for PCIE 4.0 in the general consumer market

 

For servers that's another story, but I don't have any so meh

[AresKrieger]

5 minutes ago, LucidMew said:

Maybe now buying a top tier mobo will be important to overclocking your GPU? And having auxiliary/supplementary power to the board might actually become standard, as opposed to the niche thing that it is now.

No, power limits aren't the limiting factor the silicon lottery and thermals are, power can play a role but if the card is designed properly (*cough* reference 480 *cough*) that will not matter since it isn't the main hurdle for OCs

[patrickjp93]

29 minutes ago, AresKrieger said:

No, power limits aren't the limiting factor the silicon lottery and thermals are, power can play a role but if the card is designed properly (*cough* reference 480 *cough*) that will not matter since it isn't the main hurdle for OCs

Power limits aren't, but having very crisp, uniform power delivery quality is a must for good overclocking.

[AresKrieger]

Just now, patrickjp93 said:

Power limits aren't, but having very crisp, uniform power delivery quality is a must for good overclocking.

This is true, and the board could clean up the power going into the card via the pcie but rather then spending the extra on the board for a feature like this you could just get a better PSU, it would be cheaper and you should be getting a good PSU anyway if overclocking or system longevity is remotely a concern.

 

As you've said in previous posts servers are where this technology is relevant since consumers will not be able to utilize this improvement fully for quite some time.

 

[Agosto]

2 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

 the average electricity cost is $0.13/kw/h.

You 'murricans have some seriously cheap electricity

[Giddyguy]

3 hours ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Even PCI-E 2.0 x8 is enough for current GPUs... This will only be a marketing thing, as it won't matter whether it's gonna be PCI-E 3.0 or 4.0 on the motherboard, same as it doesn't matter whether your motherboard has a 2.0 x16 slot or a 3.0 x16 slot as there's no performance impact even on the most bandwidth-hungry cards

Just want to poin out that there are other applications for PCIE Express than just graphics cards, but yes you are correct that in the gaming market its just going to be another marketing 'feature' for mobo manufacturers.