- PCIE 6.0 will soon come to AMD platforms but not for consumers
- Most users do not need PCIE 6.0 speed before much later
- Enterprise and AI will adopt PCIE 6.0 long before Desktop and Laptop PCs
AMD plans to support PCI 6.0, which starts in 2026, but SSDs based on the standard are not expected to appear in consumer -PCs anytime soon.
Silicon Motion’s CEO, Wallace C. Kuo, told Toms Hardware This PC manufacturers and chip suppliers simply don’t push the technology yet.
“You won’t see any PCIE GEN6 [solutions] Until 2030, “said Kuo.” PC OEMs have very little interest in PCIE 6.0 right now – they won’t even talk about it. AMD and Intel won’t talk about it. “
PCIE 4.0 speeds are fine for most
This delay is not a surprise – as PCIE 6.0 offers up to 32 GB/s bandwidth of an X4 connection, the complexity and cost of supporting this speed is much higher than for PCIe 5.0.
Enterprise Systems and AI infrastructure is on the other hand where PCIE 6.0 will land first. These use cases can justify the need for faster interconnections as they are very dependent on moving huge amounts of data quickly and reliably.
For anyone else, including players and content creators, PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 offer more than enough speed.
It is worth pointing out that there are very few laptops that come with PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Most PCs today use PCIe 4.0, and it’s still fast enough for almost all mainstream workloads. The right bottleneck consumers are not facing bandwidth-related.
Technical obstacles are also part of the problem. As the PCIe speed rises, the physical distance signals can be dramatically shrinked.
A presentation of Astera Labs claims that copper tracks on a motherboard can reach up to 11 inches at PCIE 4.0 speeds, but it drops to only 3.4 inches with PCIE 6.0. It is a real problem on desktops using ladder card or complex routing, especially for graphics cards.
Retimizes can solve this on servers, but they are too expensive for most consumer buildings.
Making motherboards compatible with PCIE 6.0 also means more PCB layers and higher quality materials that push the cost up. For the time being, the extra expense and current just don’t make sense to most users.
PCIE 5.0 SSDs probably remain the top-end setting for desktop PCs for the rest of the decade. The storage industry may be ready for the next step, but consumers probably do not need or want it until well after 2030.
