Is PCI 4.x already dead ???

[stratege1401]

Hello,

 

Last september, Marvell announce their first PCI 5.x SSD controller.

 

Today, Samsung annouce their fistd PCI-5.0 SSD for enterprise grade hardware.

 

Samsung also said they will have PCI 5.x available at same time as the Sapphire Rapids from Intel around June 2022.

 

PCI 3.x dated back from 2004 !!!

PCI 4.x was available around end of 2019.

PCI 5.x seem to be coming in the next 6 months...

 

So, is it worth buying some new hardware based on PCI 4.x ... or should we simply wait a few month the the next top notch hardware ???

 

 

 

[BondiBlue]

1 minute ago, stratege1401 said:

PCI 3.x dated back from 2004 !!!

PCIe 3.0 wasn't a thing until 2010 IIRC. PCIe 2.0 wasn't even released until 2007.

[stratege1401]

2 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

PCIe 3.0 wasn't a thing until 2010 IIRC. PCIe 2.0 wasn't even released until 2007.

Yes, that's true... I had my first PCI 3 rig in 2009 ... 

But seem's technologie are becoming available much much faster now. Intel Z690 with PCI 5.x support is already here, Alder -Lake 12th generation with PCI 5 is already here ...

 

New AMD ZEN4 will support PCI5 for next june will be official next january ...

 

I guess, this is looking bad for all those PCI4.x new hardware, who are unavailable in shops due to the corona crisis... Some manufacturers like Kioxia are already talking about avoiding large PCI4.x eco-system ....

 

 

[Chris Pratt]

No, because PCIe is forwards and backwards compatible. There are some other features added in each new revision, but the headline is always a doubling of bandwidth. However, that bandwidth is per lane and lanes and be combined or bifurcated according to the particular application. For example, you could run a PCIe 4.0 graphics card in just 8 or sometimes even just 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes, since very few GPUs actually exceed PCIe 3.0x16 (or PCIe 4.0x8) and some don't even exceed PCIe 2.0x16 (or PCIe 3.0x8). The same goes for NVMe SSDs. You can run two PCIe 3.0 drives at full speed with 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes, since PCIe 3.0x4 is equal to PCIe 4.0x2.

 

The drives that are being announced for PCIe 5.0 are Enterprise drives. They're destined for servers, and will be priced accordingly. There's very few consumer applications of even PCIe 4.0 speeds on drives, let alone PCIe 5.0. Even then, you could run a PCIe 5.0 drive in a PCIe 4.0 slot, if you had to for some strange reason. It will just run at 4.0 speeds, or half what it's rated for. They're not going to stop making lesser gen version drives, though, because again, in many cases you don't need more. You can still buy PCIe 3.0 drives, even though 4.0 has been out for a while. You might even see PCIe 5.0 drives that use PCIe 4.0 speeds. The WD SN750 SE is an example of a 4.0 drive with 3.0 speeds. The benefit to something like that is that you will be able to use the increased bandwidth of each lane to use less lanes, which then means you can have more drives.

 

In short, PCIe 5.0 coming around doesn't mean the death of previous versions. Similar to how there's still USB2 devices like mice and keyboards, because you simply don't need more than the bandwidth of that spec for that purpose.

[Quackers101]

It might be that we skip over gen 4. So long they add gen 6 the year after to just troll people. xP  and as said above, some is not fully on the consumer level, so it might be a short era of PCIe gen 4.

But not sure. Also then you got price.

Not sure what the real benefit for us would be yet. Might be better for those future visions about direct data streaming between GPU and storage.

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

It might be that we skip over gen 4.

But not sure. Also then you got price.

Not sure what the real benefit for us would be yet. Might be better for those future visions about direct data streaming between GPU and storage.

As it will be more expensive to use a PCIe 5.0 controller on the GPU than PCIe 4.0, I'd expect them to stick with 4.0 wherever it has enough bandwidth.  The good thing about 5.0 is presumably it means more bandwidth to the chipset so you can add more 3.0 and 4.0 devices without saturating the chipset bandwidth.  This will be doubly useful I'd expect in laptops where hopefully we will start to see multiple thunderbolt ports without bottlenecks.

[AnonymousGuy]

PCIe version has been irrelevant since Gen 3.  The only benefit, really, is now you can run a GPU off 5.0 x1 with no performance loss (although really no motherboard would even boot with that configuration anyways)

[stratege1401]

Well, thanks for your input.

 

The lines availability is a very good catch i did not consider... Capacity vs Speed. 

 

Concerning Samsung, they were clearly talking consumer grade pci 5.0 ssd for next june !

 

I guess PCI4 will have a short era... 

Geek's doesnt care at all about pricing, so it is not an issue.

 

As an exemple, in France FTTH up to 10G is available... I am enjoying the saturation of my PCI3 MVNe SSD while downloading... 56K modem are not so old, and vdsl2 is still around too...

 

 

[Quackers101]

4 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

As it will be more expensive to use a PCIe 5.0 controller on the GPU than PCIe 4.0, I'd expect them to stick with 4.0 wherever it has enough bandwidth.  The good thing about 5.0 is presumably it means more bandwidth to the chipset so you can add more 3.0 and 4.0 devices without saturating the chipset bandwidth.  This will be doubly useful I'd expect in laptops where hopefully we will start to see multiple thunderbolt ports without bottlenecks.

Sounds like a nightmare to be honest, on the current consumer builds. Like some issues around PCIe gen 4 that has been for a while? Or to more demand on these chipsets or controllers and that they would need to meet said specs? And hope the chip doesnt break *looks at watercooling motherboards*

[stratege1401]

6 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

PCIe version has been irrelevant since Gen 3.  The only benefit, really, is now you can run a GPU off 5.0 x1 with no performance loss (although really no motherboard would even boot with that configuration anyways)

Sorry, but i totally disagree here... Bandwidth is a thing. As is said, i am already enjoying FTTH up to  8 Gb/s. My pci3 ssd is saturated ... 

[stratege1401]

13 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

Sounds like a nightmare to be honest, on the current consumer builds. Like some issues around PCIe gen 4 that has been for a while? Or to more demand on these chipsets or controllers and that they would need to meet said specs? And hope the chip doesnt break *looks at watercooling motherboards*

Your watercooling hints make me think it might be related to my Samsung SSD 960 PRO failing....

 

Using the Samsung Magician Software, i have heat rising up to 70-80 for my 860 PRO while under heavy loads. Normal scale is between 80-100

But my 980 PRO WITH heatsink is closer to 60 ...

 

I will buy a heatsink a retest the 960 PRO... 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Another thing is getting 4 and 5 over a distance is a problem, which is why only the top slots in AMD motherboards AFAIK are 4.0 now.

 

So again I expect the real key to this to be that the chipset/mux has more bandwidth to convert into 3.0 slots.

 

I wonder if we could see motherboards with more x4 slots instead of x1, that would be useful IMO, though probably wont happen as that would limit the space for M.2 slots.

Personally as I'm less about aesthetics I'd rather have a board with a ton of x4 slots and use M.2 adapters in those, as it leaves more options open for proper expansion.

[AnonymousGuy]

2 hours ago, stratege1401 said:

Sorry, but i totally disagree here... Bandwidth is a thing. As is said, i am already enjoying FTTH up to  8 Gb/s. My pci3 ssd is saturated ... 

PCIE3x4 is already 4GB/s, how are you saturating that with 8gbps?  Anyways even if you happen to have a sequential workload, which most isn't, it's not like you're saturating it for long.  "oh my 4k UHD rip took 5 seconds to copy instead of 10":

 

 

If you're getting paid to edit videos...ok maybe but that's not most people.

[Dogzilla07]

It's good the lifespan of various technologies is becoming shorter again, that's how it was back in the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s

 

It's a win, win, win situation for everyone, there's no single entity on our planet or our solar system that won't benefit from this in the medium-long run (and most will benefit in the short term as well), it just takes a bit to adjust.

[YoungBlade]

As long as PCIe is backwards compatible, it doesn't matter how fast the generations go by.

 

I just bought a PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive for my computer a few months ago. The computer supports Gen 4, but I bought a Gen 3 drive anyway. I didn't care to spend 50% extra for the speed boost, because why should I care? What does even a typical user do that would benefit from a PCIe Gen 4 drive?

 

"Large data transfers," you say, not realizing that you're inside a rhetorical conversation.

 

Well, let me tell you a story: The other day, I transferred a bunch of data from my one NVMe to the other - over 600GB. (I reformatted one of the drives in the hopes of fixing a bug.) Most of the time, the transfer was running at 100-200MB/s, quite often it would dip to a few MB/s or even into the KB/s range, and the whole thing took well over an hour. That's basically 20 times slower than the rated speeds of the two drives.

 

"How can that be?!" you ask.

 

Because filesystem overhead is a thing, and it means that with the exception of a few large files, I was never going to get anywhere near the 2GB/s of the slower drive, let alone the 3GB/s of the faster one. It doesn't matter if you're using a prototype Gen 5 NVMe or a floppy disk, transferring a bunch of small, 16KB files is going to be done at KB/s, not GB/s.

 

Even a basic SATA SSD is more than sufficient for 95% of users, as it gets you the random read/write performance necessary for the OS and applications to run smoothly. In a blind taste test, you would never notice the difference between a "slow" Gen 3 NVMe and a "fast" Gen 5 one.