The PCI-SIG announces the next generation of PCIe technology-- the PCIe 6.0 specification-- is on track for a final 2021 release, following the completion of revision 0.3 of the specification.

The organisation completed the PCIe 5.0 specification just a few months ago, specifically on May 2019. We know little as to how version 6.0 will improve on it, other than the doubling of the data rate to 64 GT/s while maintaining backward compatibility with all previous spec generations. For the curious, the 64 GT/s figure refers to GigaTransfers per second over the interface, and clocks to around 256GB/s of bandwidth (or 128GB/s in each direction).

The SIG also points out it is implementing PAM-4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) encoding and low-latency Forward Error Correction (FEC) with additional mechanisms to improve bandwidth efficiency. The organisation is also keen to stress development is going on at a steady pace, and should avoid the long gap between 3.0 and 4.0, even if it involves the input of over 800 members.

Go PCI Express 6.0 Specification on Track: Revision 0.3 Complete