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PCI Express: Now with 8 gigatransfers per second; coming to a system near you in three years

The PCI Special Interest Group, or PCI-SIG, this week announced the speeds of the latest evolution to the PCI Express specification – PCI Express 3.0, also known as PCIe 3.0. PCIe 3.0 doubles the transfer rate of PCIe 2.0, bringing overall throughput to 8 gigatransfers per second, or GT/s.

PCI-SIG is designing the PCIe 3.0 standard for increased performance, but maintain backwards compatibility with PCIe and PCIe 2.0 devices. The group managed to double throughput of the existing PCIe 2.0 standard by removing the 8b/10b-encoding scheme used and additional optimizations. The 8b/10b-encoding scheme took 20 percent overhead on the overall raw bit rate, according to the group. The PCIe 3.0 standard also includes new signaling and data integrity enhancements.

"Backwards compatibility was a strong selling point for allowing our customers to migrate their technologies to the future technology, knowing that they had the connection point of being able to plug in older adapters and new adapters into existing whichever, whether it was an old or new platform,” Chairman and President of PCI-SIG Al Yanes said in an interview.  “This backwards compatibility we're maintaining with the 8GT spec.”

PCIe 3.0 remains in development and isn’t slated for finalization until 2009. The group doesn’t expect industry adoption of the upcoming standard until 2H 2010-2011 timeframe, according to Yanes. The group is unsure which companies will support the upcoming PCIe 3.0 specification, but hints there are 900 companies that are part the PCI-SIG group that push the technology.

“Graphics has been a strong proponent of PCI Express, they've always lead the charge of adopting a new generation,” Yanes said. “There's no reason to think this is any different. We certainly think graphic vendors will be a strong supporter with PCIe 3.0,” he added.

In addition to doubling the transfer speeds of PCIe 2.0, the group is actively looking at new protocol extensions for PCIe 3.0, according to Yanes. The group wants to enhance the specification with better efficiency and power management techniques through protocol extensions.

“We're also actively pursuing protocol extensions to take PCI Express efficiency and latency improvement to the next level,” he added.

Expect PCI-SIG to release the official PCIe 3.0 specification in 2009.

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Wheres PCIe 2.0
By woozy on 8/10/2007 1:22:43 PM , Rating: 2
Thinking about PCIe 3.0 already, i dont think most users have even started using PCIe 2.0 then why jump straight to 3.0 ??




RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By leidegre on 8/10/2007 1:31:58 PM , Rating: 4
I find these posts a bit meaningless, but that the hell. Sure it's ahead of it's time, but it's the same principle as always with these annoucnments. If you build it, they will come. Frankly I never did get the the whole PCIe/AGP switch but, if they say we need more bandwidth; we need more bandwidth!


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By Xerstead on 8/10/2007 1:46:52 PM , Rating: 2
We will need more bandwidth... eventually. This is due in 3 years. I guess that will slip a little as well, plus a bit longer for the market to adopt it.
I remember 3 years ago my Geforce 4600Ti 4xAGP was a still reasonable card, now its in a box on the shelf.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By webdawg77 on 8/10/2007 3:51:30 PM , Rating: 2
LOL, my GeForce Ti4200 8X AGP card is still going good in my webserver. Yeah, I don't really need it for gaming, but it's not sucking up any RAM either :).


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By LogicallyGenius on 8/11/07, Rating: -1
RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By Howard on 8/12/2007 1:38:55 AM , Rating: 3
Nothing will advance if you don't look ahead.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By S3anister on 8/10/07, Rating: -1
RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By MeTaedet on 8/10/2007 10:44:40 PM , Rating: 2
I'll take that card. Unfortunately I'll be using this hand-me-down, p.o.s. Dell with super-mega, amazing, radical, awesome extreme Intel integrated graphics with a whopping 64 mbs of memory until such time as I have saved enough money to buy my dream machine. Please, someone, save me from this cpu-gpu-and-ram-limited hell I am currently living in! I can hardly play videos of games, much less the actual games. It's a nightmare. Imagine having to wait 15 seconds for Firefox to open and 60 or more for iTunes to open... yeah...


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By xsilver on 8/10/2007 11:46:32 PM , Rating: 2
Your post is in gibberish.
let me rephrase for u

some kid is going to go "LOL OMG PCI-3" must have and gets a dell machine with a 64mb PCI-3 graphics card that has 4 pipes and 400mhz clock speed and barely runs sims 2 and the kid goes OMG CUTTING EDGE GRAPHICS!!
feel free to substitute kid for stupid dad.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By krotchy on 8/10/2007 2:04:28 PM , Rating: 5
Remember, PCIe is not just for video. Sure its the most common use. But the PCIe bus is envisioned to be the universal bus for the future. Currently 2K Capture cards, Raid controllers, TV tuners, sound cards (a few so far), firewire cards, lan controllers and everything can be found in PCIe with more coming. If you dont have enough bandwidth with a PCI slot you are stuck. However in PCIe, if your card requires more than 1x, make it 4x, not enough in 4x, go 8x/16x... to get your functionality up, you can simply add lanes to the device rather than try to just fit into the 64bit PCI bus on hand. The flexibility and serial nature of the bus is incredibly powerful.

Currently PCIe 8x raid controllers are the fastest you can buy, and without a bus to fight traffic on they get dedicated speed. In the enterprise market PCIe is growing fast and becoming excessively important. Once more PCIe-1,4,8 devices become more common for consumers it will eventually replace PCI altogether.

Also remember AGP couldn't support multi-gpu's or pretty much anything non video related at all.

I personally want to see a chipset with no PCI slots, no parrallel/serial ports, no ps2 ports. Just maybe 50 PCIe lanes, USB, SATA, GigE and eSATA. Get rid of the clutter of legacy stuff. Clearly the chipset would only be useful for the high end, but i think it would help push the market to a better place in the end.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By ninjit on 8/10/2007 2:07:33 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
I personally want to see a chipset with no PCI slots, no parrallel/serial ports, no ps2 ports. Just maybe 50 PCIe lanes, USB, SATA, GigE and eSATA. Get rid of the clutter of legacy stuff


Sound's like you want a mac
:o
;)


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By Polynikes on 8/10/2007 5:44:33 PM , Rating: 2
I'd love to have more room for the possible 3 GPU (2 video, 1 physics) setup. Just give me a PCI-E 1x slot for my sound card and that's all I'd need.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By Zandros on 8/10/2007 3:32:43 PM , Rating: 2
I'm quite sure that AGP 8x was and is capable of multi-GPU configurations.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By dgingeri on 8/10/2007 3:49:01 PM , Rating: 2
Nope, AGP can only control one device at a time. Remember the old ATI Rage 128? They made a card with dual video chips, but it had to use a PCI bridge to allow 2 devices. Then problems came up with the drivers in Win2k and WinXP so it couldn't be used. The Win2K and WinXP AGP drivers couldn't handle a PCI bridge.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By Anh Huynh on 8/10/2007 3:51:35 PM , Rating: 2
The AGP 8x spec allowed for dual slots/GPUs, but no manufacturer or chipset designer took advantage of the feature.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By ATWindsor on 8/10/2007 3:53:47 PM , Rating: 3
If only the moronic mobo-makers could make their 16x-slots work with other stuff than graphic-cards, you would be suprised at how usual it is for it not to work.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By bfonnes on 8/11/2007 12:33:57 PM , Rating: 2
I'll bet it can even get me to work on time :)


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By Googer on 8/17/2007 2:04:00 AM , Rating: 2
You personaly may not need RS232 Serial, but there are still plenty of (medical/scientific/home theater) devices out there where the only way to interface with them is via legacy serial. I happen to have Garmin eTrex Legend (Still produced) and it requires an RS232 port for mapping and firmware updates.

Also there are tons of POS laser scanners and die hard IBM Model M keyboard users that still depend on the old PS/2 port.

Instead of getting rid of PCI, why not supplant it in future motherboards with one or PCI-x slot that maintains reverse compatability with most older PCI devices while at the same time giving them a boost in performance. And the rest of the space on the motherboard can be dedicated to five or six 16/32 lane PCI-e.

Plus there is still a blank spot in the peripherals business, not enough PCI-e devices have come to market to completely replace legacy PCI (i.e. Soundcards). There are some of us whom don't really want to get rid of their M-Audio Revolution any time soon, so keep PCI legacy.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By DallasTexas on 8/10/07, Rating: -1
RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By onereddog on 8/10/2007 6:34:48 PM , Rating: 4
Do you always write in bold?


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By Scabies on 8/10/2007 9:35:25 PM , Rating: 2
BETTER.THAN.CAPS.PERIODS.ITALICIZEDS.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By TSS on 8/11/2007 2:43:09 PM , Rating: 2
ok, knock it off... even tough techies are not your average joe, lets keep it tech rekated...


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By scrapsma54 on 8/12/2007 11:16:46 AM , Rating: 3
Because It was an economic movement ordered through the internets by George W. Bush.


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By SandmanWN on 8/12/2007 3:06:31 PM , Rating: 2
Im laughing on the inside... No Really... :/


RE: Wheres PCIe 2.0
By Slaimus on 8/13/2007 11:18:11 AM , Rating: 2
The same can be said of HyperTransport, where is HT2? PCI-E 2.0 at least will be implemented by hardware.


Latencies
By phatboye on 8/10/2007 1:26:58 PM , Rating: 2
From what I've been hearing (I don't know much about bus protocols like PCIe) is that the major reason why sound card companies are reluctant to move to PCIe is because of the high latencies. My question is will the PCI-SIG group ever resolve this issue. Other than a few high performance RAID cards are we even using up all the bandwidth provided by v2.0? If not it sounds silly to be worrying about bandwidth when there is a bigger issue at hand. I'd like to dump PCI once and for all but I can't find a decent PCIe sound card.

I'm a noob so plz don't down rank me if anything I said was wrong.




RE: Latencies
By MasterYoda on 8/10/2007 1:47:08 PM , Rating: 2
Creative will be releasing PCI-E versions of its X-Fi card in the future. Asus also will be releasing their own sound card on PCI-E.


RE: Latencies
By omnicronx on 8/10/2007 1:53:54 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
From what I've been hearing (I don't know much about bus protocols like PCIe) is that the major reason why sound card companies are reluctant to move to PCIe is because of the high latencies.
I am not a master in the subject, but i think this is a common miscomception, pcie latencies are not that high, USB latencies are much much higher and there have been usb soundcards for ages.

From what i have heard, creative does not want to make a native PCIe soundcard, as 95% of consumers still have pci slots, so why spend all of the R&D on pcie when not everyone has it, and people will still buy pci.

From the sounds of things what creative tried to do is create a pci to pcie bridge, so they did not need to have 2 different lines of sound cards, and as a result they have been plagued by latency issues, and have not been able to come up with a solution, (although this does not surprise me since creative never developed their own pci solution, they just aquired it from another company).

Of course this does leave other soundcard manufacturers, but i am guessing they are in the same boat, especially when they have to compete with creative. Two product lines could cost smaller sound card companies more money than releasing a native PCIe card before creative.

Someone can correct me if I am wrong btw, as I said, I am not a master in the subject


RE: Latencies
By SandmanWN on 8/10/2007 2:59:26 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
From what i have heard, creative does not want to make a native PCIe soundcard, as 95% of consumers still have pci slots, so why spend all of the R&D on pcie when not everyone has it, and people will still buy pci.

Of course they want to create a PCIe card and get the R&D out of the way. It would be idiotic not to. The industry is going PCIe and if they don't invest that money now then they take the chance on someone else slipping their foot in the door and stealing their business. Not to mention it gives creative plenty of time to spot production issues ahead of the industry push for PCIe.

quote:
From the sounds of things what creative tried to do is create a pci to pcie bridge, so they did not need to have 2 different lines of sound cards

It would make far more sense to do a PCIe to PCI bridge not the other way around. Creative should follow the example set by the Graphics industry when they developed PCIe graphics and bridged them back to AGP slots. Its not like there are any major improvements coming in the sound card industry. I mean do you really need more than 7 channel audio?

I would think it would be smarter to finish up a PCIe card then bridge it back to PCI, so that when PCIe takes over the industry its a simple matter of removing the bridge and redoing the pin outs and your done in no time.


RE: Latencies
By omnicronx on 8/10/2007 3:22:47 PM , Rating: 2
You are a bit confused about how creative does business.
Creative has a stranglehold on the soundcard industry, especially when it comes to gaming. The EAX standard, used in almost everygame for surround will keep creative in the market no matter what they do.

The fact that they have still yet to release a digital sound card proves this, as EAX(over 2) does not work with spdif out. creative makes a huge amount of money off of EAX licenses, and with no other standard other than OpenAL, which amazingly creative also owns, they are basically in the drivers seat and they can do pretty much what they want. If creative thinks they can get away with delaying PCIe cards until more people have PCIe, they will.

As for your bridge comments, the whole point of making a pci to pcie bridge is so they can use their current cards with minimal changes and minimal additional costs. doing it the other way around would make absolutely no sense as they would have to develop a native pcie solution and on top of that they would have to develop a pcie to pci bridge, totally defying the point of trying to find a cost effective way to implement PCIe.
quote:
Its not like there are any major improvements coming in the sound card industry.
As for this comment, thats exactly where creative wants to keep things, keep the money flowing in from licensing, while lowering costs to eliminate competition.


RE: Latencies
By SandmanWN on 8/10/2007 4:25:37 PM , Rating: 2
Stranglehold? Not much of a stranglehold when practically every integrated audio chip on the market is capable of 7.1. ADI and Realtek seem to have the real stranglehold. You can bet those two are working on their integrated solutions to use the pcie bus.

Unless you are an insider from Creative then you will have to prove these accusations. I find it supremely far fetched to imagine Creative is sitting on its duff waiting to get it handed to them.


RE: Latencies
By Bluestealth on 8/10/2007 5:15:16 PM , Rating: 2
They have a stranglehold over the "Hardware Accelerated" Gaming Audio APIs ONLY. Which would be:
A3D(Purchased and killed)
EAX1-2(Lisensed out?, fairly crappy, especially if not implemented correctly, dead for new development)
EAX3-5(Dead for new development, killed by Vista, but clings to life through ALchemy)
openAL 1.1(Cross Platform, Open Source, Widely Implemented in OS/Games, Only Supported by Creative in Hardware/Drivers)

Any software accelerated audio stack works fine, and are fairly common as well.
I am curious though what it takes to license OpenAL to use in a game or in your hardware/driver.

BTW Most of the people who complain about no EAX3-5/OpenAL on 2 channel+ over digital fail to realize that it doesn't offer you any better sound in most cases, only slightly less cable mess, as would any non-HD/compressed digital stream.

Sure if Creative "isn't" offering the absolute best DACs in their cards, or you have it hooked up to an "Ultra-High End" receiver that converts inputs to digital automatically for some reason, then you might have a complaint. Until you show me your super audiophile setup I'll dismiss you out of hand.


RE: Latencies
By AndreasM on 8/10/2007 11:13:04 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
BTW Most of the people who complain about no EAX3-5/OpenAL on 2 channel+ over digital fail to realize that it doesn't offer you any better sound in most cases, only slightly less cable mess, as would any non-HD/compressed digital stream.

Sure if Creative "isn't" offering the absolute best DACs in their cards, or you have it hooked up to an "Ultra-High End" receiver that converts inputs to digital automatically for some reason, then you might have a complaint. Until you show me your super audiophile setup I'll dismiss you out of hand.


Anyone building a new setup today is silly if they opt to go for anything else than a digital connection. I don't see why I should buy/use old tech just because Creative is lagging behind.


RE: Latencies
By Bluestealth on 8/11/2007 12:25:49 AM , Rating: 2
LOL...
You are convinced that because there is a digital option that it always better?!

You must convert digital information back into analog to actually use it for anything useful. Humans CANNOT process digital information, unless you have some kind of cranial implant that hasn’t been invented yet, as the research is no-where close to that level.

Creative has in fact used that trick (Must have Digital!) in the past to sell very expensive speakers then pulled out support for them… but in their case they actually were of superior design then what is available today since it was all uncompressed digital audio.

Your incompetence astounds me... we are talking about an interconnect between a digital sound card and an amplifier with speakers. You cannot use a digital signal to drive a speaker, it must be an amplified analog signal.

DTS/Dolby standards that people are used to for real time compression are probably a step down in quality due to compression. However, the lossless HD and uncompressed digital audio streams are superior as an interconnect, and then only in some cases. (The quality of the conversions must be BETTER than what the sound card can already do)

Besides for most people the digital connections only add complexity to their setup on computer… most people do not have a receiver or want a digital decoder with an amplifier attached.

For those that want a digital out only… you DON’T need a nice sound card AT ALL, unless you happened to want hardware accelerated 3D sound as well… then you would just need to run a few cables with no noticeable difference. If you are actually “serious” about 3D audio at all you already have tons of speaker cables for multi-positional audio. Besides if you get a sound card with good hardware processing of 3D sound, high-end/top end Digital to Analog converters and then use the digital output… you basically just wasted all your money on everything but the actual sound processing chip.

For your type all you need is a sound card that can output HD/lossless/uncompressed audio and a hardware accelerated sound processor.
If you don’t care about 3D sound, you don’t even need more then 2 channels of uncompressed audio or a pre-assembled digital stream.

For the record as of late I HATE Creative, they have broken their statements about actually coming out with even a semi-working driver for the X-Fi on Linux. They also have allowed a major problem with their digital out to go unfixed in their XP drivers, which I use for watching movies, because the Creative and Cyberlink software decoders sound like shit.(OMG he uses his analog and digital outs on a high-end sound card?)


RE: Latencies
By Bluestealth on 8/11/2007 12:29:43 AM , Rating: 2
BTW if someone comes out with an openAL hardware accelerated card with a real time uncompressed/HD/lossless 7.1 digital output... I would buy it. Till then your just kidding yourself its better in most cases.

PS Sorry about the long replies. Somehow a discussion about PCIe turned into a discussion about creative and digital vs. analog soundcards/sources.


RE: Latencies
By AndreasM on 8/11/2007 10:58:19 AM , Rating: 2
It doesn't matter how expensive the sound card is, doing the digital to analog conversion inside the computer will sound worse than sending the digital stream to an external amplifier for conversion (unless one has a very poor quality DAC in the amplifier). In my case the difference is even more obvious, as I have a realtek's on-board soundcard; the sound its crappy DAC produces is so poor that it isn't even funny!

Keep things in digital form inside the computer, and use specialized devices to convert it to analog.


RE: Latencies
By Bluestealth on 8/11/2007 2:40:45 PM , Rating: 2
Most don't have a receiver, so they would have to listen to realtek's crappy sound quality, however the sound from a high end sound card is about the same or better then some receivers.
Since most people just want a 2.1 or 5.1 amplified system with no sound processing at ALL connected to their computer, your solution only adds complexity and cost. I mean we are talking about 1 vs 3-4 cables here. I gave you that digital has its uses but your kidding yourself if you believe it "always" gives you superior sound AT THE MOMENT.
Finally we come to the matter of conversion... whats better sound with dynamic range cut out or sound that is sent in an analog form and then amplified?
Maybe if we were talking about interconnects that were ~20 feet long I'd give you that some quality could be substantially lost, but we are talking about probably a max of 6 feet in MOST cases.
A sound card with a good power supply and high end DACs (in some cases the SAME ones in your receiver) is no worse than your receiver. You are comparing a built in realtek to an X-Fi or CMedia 8787/8788 with high end DACs, or if money allows a professional line sound card.


RE: Latencies
By omnicronx on 8/13/2007 10:55:09 AM , Rating: 2
if you think the dacs inside any soundcard less than 500$ are better than any receiver over 200$ (whenever it was bought) you have some problems. DACS aside, just the added noise of your computer will degrade the sound.

quote:
whats better sound with dynamic range cut out or sound that is sent in an analog form and then amplified?
haha, its nice too see you can tell one side of the story, the dynamic range is not cut, it is compressed (and is only an issue with Dolby digital, not DTS:I). and this is only to deal with the fact that dolby was created for theatre use which is the perfect listening area, so hearing whispering in the movies is a lot harder to hear in a smaller room. but if the dialogue is normalized correctly, the difference is almost inaudible, and is only really effected in the first place by hometheatre setups with very low power. Furthermore, the extra noise through analogue connections counteracts any advantage it would have had over dolby digital in the first place. Of course all this trouble can be bypassed if your card supports DTS:i output.


RE: Latencies
By Bluestealth on 8/13/2007 9:54:45 PM , Rating: 2
Ok, at this point I'm going to stop arguing about audio quality, actual loss, difference etc..
Instead I will just say that for the majority of people buying these “Gamer” cards, because they are for sure not pro-audio cards, these features add nothing.

Most of them will be using 2.1 to 5.1 systems (maybe even 7.1) with some amplifier and speakers, and at most a digital decoder of questionable quality.

People who want Digital output of multi-channel game audio are in the minority. Which is probably the reason the Audigy/X-Fi never had these features, due to the expense of hardware DTS/Dolby encoding solution. Since their main advantage was CPU usage vs. their competitors (other features aside) a software encoder would have put them looking about the same in reviews while turned on.

Now they do have an unfair advantage based on their hardware accelerated EAX3-5 and OpenAL 1.1 in the gaming world. However, as it stands the potential market share is pretty depressing in and of its own, and PC gaming now has to compete directly with consoles.

In addition with the move towards software audio rather than hardware accelerated audio due to Vista, 3D positional audio and DTS encoding can easily be added on by their competitors in software(at the expense of CPU time of course). Also the quality of the soundcard really doesn’t have to be “that” great anymore. If it follows the new HD audio standard and keeps everything in a digital format, there shouldn’t be any problems.

Going forward I will agree that using the digital out to a receiver is a better solution. However, everything you need to do this is already built into your motherboard, and you are no longer the consumer for a sound card, or “Gamer” card in most cases. Furthermore unless Creative licenses out openAL to competitors I don’t see their market expanding beyond what it currently is. I also don’t see any other competitors interested in getting into Creative’s particular market, especially now that we are going to start having more cores in our computers than we have code to feed.

BTW I am not saying that receiver’s DACs are bad or even worse in most cases. Just that you are greatly diminishing the quality of non-pro soundcards. I mean do you really think a slightly better DSP than what is generally on motherboards today, some gold plated connectors, and circuitry cost $100-200, and that any sane person would buy them?
Creative may be funded by the gamers, but the others exist for a reason as well.


Gigatransfers?
By ninjit on 8/10/2007 2:05:05 PM , Rating: 2
Why the ambiguity?

Gigatransfers doesn't really tell us that much in terms of throughput rate.

A PCIe 2.0 16x link does 8GB/s

If a "transfer" is only 1 bit, then ver 3.0 only does 8Gb/s
if its 8 bits, then speed is the same is PCIe 2.0.

I find it very curious that the group decided to quote specs in terms of "transfers"




RE: Gigatransfers?
By Some1ne on 8/10/2007 2:19:47 PM , Rating: 2
I believe the way it works is that for each lane, the size of a "transfer" is 1 bit. So for a 1x link, 8 GT/sec translates to 8 Gbps, while an for an 8x link 8 GT/sec gives 8 GB/sec.

Probably they don't specify the size of a single "transfer" because it is variable depending upon the number of lanes used.


RE: Gigatransfers?
By cheburashka on 8/10/2007 2:40:50 PM , Rating: 2
The article is incorrect.
The 3.0 spec is 8GT/s/lane.
The 2.0 spec is 5GT/s/lane with a 20% overhead per byte effectivily reducing it to 4GT/s/lane.
Thus (excluding packet overhead) Gen1 x16, Gen2 x8, Gen3 x4 all have the same bandwidth.


RE: Gigatransfers?
By Anh Huynh on 8/10/2007 3:16:36 PM , Rating: 2
I don't see how it is incorrect. The end result of PCIe 2.0 is 4GT/s due to overhead. PCIe 3.0 doesn't have the 20% overhead required, so effectively doubling the throughput capabilities of PCIe 2.0. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.


RE: Gigatransfers?
By DigitalFreak on 8/10/2007 3:29:35 PM , Rating: 2
Basically you're looking at ~800MB/sec one-way throughput rate for a PCI-E 3.0 x1 slot, vs 250MB for a current PCI-E 1.0 x1 slot.


What about fixing the PCIe 1.0-standard first?
By ATWindsor on 8/10/2007 3:49:57 PM , Rating: 2
PCIe was supposed to give us "one slot to rule them all", instead we have non-16x-slots that are not "open" on the end, as to acommodate bigger cards, and whats worse, wuite a lot of mobos have PCIe-16x-slots that only supports graphic cards. PCIe-SIG should just refuse the mobo-makers to call it a PCIe-slot if it only supports graphic-cards.




RE: What about fixing the PCIe 1.0-standard first?
By nerdye on 8/10/2007 4:25:57 PM , Rating: 1
No its all about the future, lets have intel santa rosa chipsets that reduce performance!!! Lets move on to ddr4 before any of us can afford ddr3! Lets get video cards that use display port, while I don't even own a monitor or tv with hdmi yet! Lets talk about hyper transport 4, before Barcelona finally comes out! Lets talk about wiping, before we even drop a load as annoying as these types of stories that get published everyday!


RE: What about fixing the PCIe 1.0-standard first?
By Etsp on 8/10/2007 5:14:07 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Lets get video cards that use display port, while I don't even own a monitor or tv with hdmi yet!

What does hdmi have to do with display port other than the fact that they are digital video transmission standards?

Answer: Nothing.
quote:
Lets talk about hyper transport 4, before Barcelona finally comes out!

Well.... if people didn't talk about it years beforehand, guess how long it would take to come to market? Years after people started talking about it.


By Ajax9000 on 8/12/2007 8:43:35 PM , Rating: 2
Uhh ... nerdye was being sarcastic.

But I think the sarcasm may have been a little misplaced. PCIe 3.0 is an advance, whereas DisplayPort is a sideways move.


What is the new encoding scheme?
By Martimus on 8/10/2007 2:44:14 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
The group managed to double throughput of the existing PCIe 2.0 standard by removing the 8b/10b-encoding scheme used. The 8b/10b-encoding scheme took 20 percent overhead on the overall raw bit rate, according to the group.


You can't double the throughput just by removing a 20% overhead. The best you could do is increasing throughput by 20%. What is the new encoding scheme? Are there any check bits or identifying bits?




By Anh Huynh on 8/10/2007 3:09:11 PM , Rating: 2
My apologies, the 8b/10b encoding removal is just one of the tweaks to gain more bandwidth.

I don't know what the new encoding scheme is. The specification is still two years from finalization.


Haha
By Polynikes on 8/10/2007 5:40:40 PM , Rating: 2
Looks like I may just end up skipping PCI-E 2.0 and going straight to 3 by the time I upgrade this beast. My only plan for upgrading in the next three years is a quad core and maybe a DX10 generation video card if one worth buying ever makes it to market.




Years ago for PCIe
By dude on 8/11/2007 3:10:20 AM , Rating: 2
I remember years ago in a MaximumPC article, they had a picture of a PCIe card enclosed in a big ol' plastic casing. It was supposed to be PnP so you can just swap it with something else when needed.

Guess that idea didn't fly too well with the graphic card makers. Imagine one of the (or any) new video cards in a housing for PCIe. Can you imagine the amount of noise from exhaust fans the housing will need in order to remove it's tremendous heat?




By tygrus on 8/12/2007 7:03:42 PM , Rating: 2
"8b/10b-encoding scheme" was designed to insure data reliability. Going faster would require even more protection. PCI-E 2.0 is 5MT/s 8/10, so going to 8MT/s & 8/8 means another doubling of overall data rate.




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