The finalised PCIe 5.0 specification might be less than a month old, but the PCI-SIG already has plans for the next version of the technology-- PCIe 6.0, an update doubling the bandwidth to 64 GT/s while maintaining backwards compatibility.
In total, PCIe 6.0 promises data rates of up to 256GB/s in a x16 configuration. It uses PAM-4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) encoding and leverages existing 56G PAM-4, and includes low-latency Forward Error Correction (FEC) with additional mechanisms to improve bandwidth efficiency. As mentioned earlier, PCIe 6.0 also aims to maintain backwards compatibility with all previous PCIe generations.
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