PCI-SIG, the organization that defines the PCI Express bus and form factor specifications, has reportedly admitted that PCIe 4.0 will finally land by the end of 2017. Unfortunately, it may be a short-lived specification, as the group has already fast-tracked PCIe 5.0 for 2019.



PCI-SIG representatives attributed part of the delay to industry stagnation. The PCIe 3.0 interface was sufficient for storage, networking, graphics cards, and other devices, for the first several years after its introduction. Over the last two years, a sudden wellspring of innovation exposed PCIe 3.0’s throughput deficiencies. Artificial intelligence craves increased GPU throughput, storage devices are migrating to the PCIe bus with the NVMe protocol, and as a result, networking suddenly has an insatiable appetite for more bandwidth.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – We’ll See PCIe 4.0 This Year, PCIe 5.0 in 2019