PCI-E Version 3 Released!

[WindowsGeek]

MSI recently released PCI Express v3! You know what this means... expect great things from ATI/AMD&nVidia in the upcoming months. However the new tech seems to be exclusively on Intel-chipped boards. I don't think that AMD will have an answer to this for a while, though it looks as though it will be worth the wait. I need a new board anyway

This board seems to be definitely worth it, aside from only having 4 RAM slots (compared to other Intel boards having 6-8.)

Here is the link, for those who have interest:
http://us.msi.com/service/z68g3/

Any thoughts?

 

[clifford_cooley]

I just read about a tech that should be finalized by the end of the year.

SATA-IO Specs to Come: SATA Express, for SSDs and Hybrid Drives

The SATA Express specification provides SSD and hybrid drive manufacturers the advantages of performance and scalability enabled by PCIe 3.0 - which is available now - and the ubiquity of SATA," said Mladen Luksic, SATA-IO president. "We expect the SATA Express specification to be completed by the end of 2011.

• SATA 3.0 = 6GB
• SATA-Express on PCIe 2.0 = 8GB (I understand this to be one lane of traffic)
• SATA-Express on PCIe 3.0 = 16GB (I understand this to be two lanes of traffic)

If more bandwidth is needed in the future more lanes can be easily added at that time.

P.S.
What next USB-Express?
It certainly would not surprise me, not after reading about SATA-Express.

 

[WindowsGeek]

Interesting post! Perhaps next we will see faster LAN speeds. 16GB/sec LAN would not be a bad thing. It would certainly take advantage of faster HDD speeds for file transfers.

Anyways I understand that SATA-Express will max out the bandwidth of your PCI-E lanes, as the bandwidths listed are consistent with the maximum bandwidths of the PCI-E lanes. It seems odd that there isn't any speed lost due to processing on the card, but perhaps I am wrong.

Also what would be the use of these new platforms? I understand the 8GB/sec but not 16 yet, as I have not seen any drives of any type come close to that kind of bandwidth unless you have a striping pattern straight out of Hell itself. The only thing I have seen come anywhere close to the max of current SATA platforms would be my server itself, with 8 drives (at 10K-15K RPM) all in a RAID5 array.

But hey, a faster bus can make anything possible! Why not do something that can be done?

 

[shadowalk]

I knew it was a good idea to stick to my 5770. Perhaps I may look into the some of the upcoming Radeon HD 7xxx series cards in the coming months.

 

[Kougar]

PCI Express 3 is interesting... but keep in mind that even a single dual-GPU graphics card can't max out a PCI Express 2.0 16x port. The new standard shouldn't boost graphics performance unless the system is electrically bottlenecked to an 8x slot or some fancy multi-GPU setups are going on, or even a combination of both.

Clifford, ya saw that too eh? That link about SATA Express is extremely intriguing... unlike PCIe 2.0, SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) slots are brand new and are within 12 months of being maxed out by a single SSD, so the need for a better standard is there and gains are to be had. I can't wait to see what SATA Express will offer.

I just read about a tech that should be finalized by the end of the year.

SATA-IO Specs to Come: SATA Express, for SSDs and Hybrid Drives

• SATA 3.0 = 6GB
• SATA-Express on PCIe 2.0 = 8GB (I understand this to be one lane of traffic)
• SATA-Express on PCIe 3.0 = 16GB (I understand this to be two lanes of traffic)

If more bandwidth is needed in the future more lanes can be easily added at that time.

SATA 3.0 is a 6 Gigabit per second slot. PCI Express is in Bytes... so if you want to compare them, SATA 3 has a theoretical maximum of 750MB/s. Accounting for protocol overhead, the maximum users can expect is somewhere around the 550-650 MB/s range...

P.S.
What next USB-Express?
It certainly would not surprise me, not after reading about SATA-Express.

Actually, you aren't far off. Try this: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news...wer-laptops-monitors-soon-to-be-a-reality.ars

 

[clifford_cooley]

SATA 3.0 is a 6 Gigabit per second slot. PCI Express is in Bytes... so if you want to compare them, SATA 3 has a theoretical maximum of 750MB/s

Ouch - I didn't catch the bit/byte difference.

That would be a hefty increase over SATA even on PCIe 2.0.

 

[clifford_cooley]

SATA 3.0 is a 6 Gigabit per second slot. PCI Express is in Bytes... so if you want to compare them, SATA 3 has a theoretical maximum of 750MB/s.

Are you sure PCIe is in Bytes?

Wikilink - PCI Express

PCI Express 2.0

PCI-SIG announced the availability of the PCI Express Base 2.0 specification on 15 January 2007.[11] The PCIe 2.0 standard doubles the per-lane throughput from the PCIe 1.0 standard's 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s.​

PCI Express 3.0

Because the scrambling polynomial is known, the data can be recovered by running it through a feedback topology using the inverse polynomial"[18] and also uses a 128b/130b encoding scheme, reducing the overhead to approximately 1.5% ((130-128)/130), as opposed to the 20% overhead of 8b/10b encoding used by PCIe 2.0. PCIe 3.0's 8 GT/s bit rate effectively delivers double PCIe 2.0 bandwidth.​

 

[WindowsGeek]

For the record, one of my machines is running a PCIe 2.0 GPU on a PCIe 1.0 slot. Meets every benchmark of the one on a 2.0 slot, and this is not some low-end GPU either. This makes me thing whether or not PCIe 3.0 will be worth it in the near future. Perhaps someday far off we will have GPUs powerful enough to need it, but not right now.

PCI Express 2.0
PCI-SIG announced the availability of the PCI Express Base 2.0 specification on 15 January 2007.[11] The PCIe 2.0 standard doubles the per-lane throughput from the PCIe 1.0 standard's 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s.
PCI Express 3.0
Because the scrambling polynomial is known, the data can be recovered by running it through a feedback topology using the inverse polynomial"[18] and also uses a 128b/130b encoding scheme, reducing the overhead to approximately 1.5% ((130-128)/130), as opposed to the 20% overhead of 8b/10b encoding used by PCIe 2.0. PCIe 3.0's 8 GT/s bit rate effectively delivers double PCIe 2.0 bandwidth.

Cliff, yes, the capitol B as in MB/sec means the measure is in bytes, and the lowercase b as in Mb/sec (Internet speeds for example) means the measure is in bits.

 

[clifford_cooley]

My quote: "SATA-Express on PCIe 2.0 = 8GB"

Lets not get confused, Kougar was telling me that the 8GB in my quote is 8 Gigabytes. That is not what I have been reading everywhere.

 

[WindowsGeek]

I always thought it was in gigabytes. I thought this because PCI-X (not Express, but X - The super long 64-bit PCI slot that nobody ever made cards for, aside from RAID cards) has a 1 Gigabyte per second bandwidth limit. So I just figured that all bus standards like PCI-E were measured in GB/sec rather than Gb/sec.

 

[clifford_cooley]

After looking through the following page, I see where the confusion lays.

Computer buses - Main buses

[FONT="Courier New"]
Technology               Rate (bit/s)   Rate (byte/s)
PCI 32-bit/33 MHz        1,067 Mbit/s    133.33 MB/s
AGP 4x                   8.533 Gbit/s     1.067 GB/s
PCI-X 133                8.533 Gbit/s     1.067 GB/s

PCI Express 1.0 (x1)         2 Gbit/s       250 MB/s
PCI Express 2.0 (x1)         4 Gbit/s       500 MB/s
PCI Express 3.0 (x1)      7.88 Gbit/s      0.99 GB/s

PCI Express 1.0 (x16)       32 Gbit/s         4 GB/s
PCI Express 2.0 (x16)       64 Gbit/s         8 GB/s
PCI Express 3.0 (x16)   126.03 Gbit/s      15.8 GB/s

[/FONT]

The SATA Express article was referring to one lane transfer rate where as Kougar was referring to the transfer rate of all the lanes. PCIe 3.0 x1 is 8Gbits/s and PCIe 2.0 x16 is 8GBytes/s. Whiles the PCIe maybe referenced by Bytes the article was referencing in bits.