Consumer devices don't really need the bandwidth doubling, outside power users treating it as a way to have less lane contention instead of increased bandwidth per device, yet. Most of the attraction is for large systems hoping to remotely access/share memory in a cluster. On the consumer side the only thing really close to mattering is "higher speed sequential SSD reads/writes on an x4 m.2 NVMe slot" and even then the speeds are already a bit silly for any practical single drive purpose.

I am hoping for some PCIe x16 Gen N to 2x PCIe x16 Gen (N-1) switches - or even 4x PCIe x8 Gen (N-1).

Modern consumer devices have an x16 connection for a GPU, an x4 connection for an NVMe, and an x4 connection to the chipset for everything else. If the motherboard has more than one "x16 slot", the other slots usually only have an x1 connection!

Want to add a cheap 10G NIC? Sorry, that uses a Gen 3 x4 connection. x16-to-4xNVMe? Not going to happen. HBA adapter? Forget it.

Meanwhile, the GPU is barely using its Gen 5 x16 connection. Why can't I make use of all this spare bandwidth? Give the GPU a Gen 5 x8 instead, and split the remaining 8 lanes into 1x Gen 3 x16 + 2x Gen 3 x8 or something.

Many motherboards do allow splitting the GPU lanes into two it's just not many consumers see the need for an NVMe drive +GPU+ 2nd high speed device + 3rd high speed device that can't be served off the chipset instead.

For the prosumer crowd if you do something like the z790 you can have x4, x8, x8, and x8 to the chipset to be split as needed (x16 to be split if 3.0.

If I understand correctly, you're concerned about using older peripherals with a newer motherboard/CPU? If so, the PCIe spec requires backwards compatibility so it should still work.

A gen3 x4 card in a gen5 x1 slot gets... gen3 x1 speed. Even though gen5 x1 has the same bandwidth as gen3 x4.

So, is there such a thing as an adapter that would plug into a fast narrow slot and provide a wide slower slot with the same overall transfer rate? Or, provide multiple slower (but still just as wide) slots from one faster slot?

A PCIe switch does just that. It connects at its native speed then each port is backwards compatible effectively making wider effective slots if you connect older things downstream.

It can be hard to sort between expensive/high end enterprise stuff from low end single lane stuff for crypto mining when trying to find something useful though. NVMe m.2 storage is the best chance of finding cheep consumer options but even then you have to sort through the endless bifurcation cards to find the ones that are actual switches though.

You're making the same 64k should be enough for anyone argument.

Just because we don't need it now, doesn't mean we won't. Just because we might not, the mere fact it becomes available drives prices of existing drives down. That is something everyone needs. That is something that moves society forward.

No, I don't think it's the same "64K should be good enough" at all. Even then many people were rightly skeptical btw.

As a guy who did the very occasional data science job, my iMac Pro's SSD tops out at ~2.7 GB/s in sequential workloads. For 4.5 years of using it I've only seen 3 programs being able to use its SSD to the absolute maximum, and the tasks lasted 30-40 seconds. So it didn't matter much.

I get it, there are people who do specialized work and are doing it every day and they need absolutely everything that the hardware can give them but realistically your average JS / Python / Golang / Rust dev having a 5700x with 32GB RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD (e.g. topping at 4 GB/s) is not just quite fine, they are likely over-served even.

As a guy who peeked under the hood of a lot of open-source software, I have found that software is 99% of the bottleneck, even today. Almost nothing has changed.

I don't think you are correct on this, with ML workloads becoming a thing, increasing speeds across the board is extremely important.

And? You're saying all of us will train models all day?

This is the same 64k argument again.

You don't know what is possible with more resources being made available.

Eventually, people will figure out how to use them.

The main issue we face is that we're not limited by the top end, we're limited by the bottom end.

Bottom end computers are still running sata and 8gb of ram. Once you see that stuff move to 32gb and 1tb nvme, you might see changes in strategy.

Games are a big one for example, those things now run multi hundred GB, SSD speeds make a huge difference in what is possible there.

Just wait til game Devs figure out how to use generative ai backed by huge models disk speed and ram will definitely play a role.

These are pure hypotheticals and as such are not interesting at all.

People back then knew very well what they'd do with beyond 64K. Unlike you who is simply hand-waving this away by saying "who knows what will we use it for".

You're also forgetting financials which is quite a glaring omission. Modern computer prices haven't dropped much in a while now, like 5 years or so, because the bleeding edge remains expensive. Most people are unwilling to pay bigger and bigger prices for what they perceive as the same processing power -- and their perception is largely correct because software remains the dominating bottleneck in computing power.

So nope, it's not the same 64K argument again. We have companies that desperately want us to believe that we want 512 GB/s RAM modules and we should pay thousands for the privilege of having hardware that is only 0.1% likely to be utilized properly.

People do get hyped up when they see these impressive numbers, yes. But when they see the prices, they suddenly get smarter.

Nowhere am I saying consumers won't eventually use more bandwidth, just not in the current generation of hardware.

Also I'm not sure it really prices existing drives down any as much as prices new classes of drives up. Similar to data center GPUs not making the nvidia 4000 series dirt cheap compared to previous years - nearly the opposite it detracts from focus on the budget standard consumer focused segments

It’s still “WOW” and tickles my “remember when” neurons.

Hell yes. I will never forget the day that I upgrade from spinning hard drive to an NVMe drive. It blew my mind. That was a "post I/O" moment for me. Up until then, almost all of my computing experiences were limited by slow hard drives. I had "enough" CPU, memory, and network, but the disks were always too slow. NVMe was a 100x improvement.

I still remember apps opening in less than one “bounce” on the OS X dock back in the snow leopard days. That was on a hackintosh with a 7200rpm hard drive. To be honest, I don’t really remember my first real Mac (a Haswell late 2013 MBP with NVME) feeling all that different. I’m sure large disk operations were faster, and compile times were faster because of the better CPU, but something about that “good enough” snow leopard desktop setup withh spinning metal worked great; maybe they warmed up some caches of apps they knew you were likely to use to make the basics feel fast.

Overall I feel like things have gotten less snappy since then, but it’s hard to be objective after all these years.

My newest desktop is still PCIe 3. Apparently by the time I get around to upgrading, things will be really fast.

Nah. The software bloat will have caught up by then, and things will be just as slow..

External cable size is limited by flexibility. In theory the 4x variant could drive an external GPU at PCIe 5 x16 bandwidth.

Alternatively, it could drive a 4x16 card and have bandwidth left for fast SSDs and fast Ethernet and various USB stuff at the same time. That sounds great for laptop docks.

    > PCIE5 devices are still rare

I would agree for expansion cards, such as GPUs and network cards. But I would disagree for NVMe drives. There are plenty now. And really, how many do you need? Even if there are three options for PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives, it will be enough. All will be far faster than you will ever need.

Sure, but I'd be worried about durability if the choice is as scarce. I don't need 32+ GB/s, I need something that will last me 10+ years.

For NMVe drives? All the components are made by third party vendors -- except Samsung who makes their own ASIC. As long as your GB written per day is well below their warranty, you will be fine.

Warranties are always presented in terms of years rather than TBW. When shopping you have to go to the manufacturers' websites and pull the data sheets for every single model. Two drives for the same price could both have 5 year warranties but have vastly different endurance ratings. It's similar to x-mile, y-year warranty system with cars but in this case you have to hunt down the x-mile piece yourself.

On top of that, newer versions can release within same product line but have much worse endurance ratings. For example, my old Corsair MP600 2TB drives from 2020 are rated for 3600 TBW. The newer MP600 Core XT and Elite models have 450 TBW and 1600 TBW respectively. My MP600 drives are currently at 1.5-2.0 PB written.

The standard needs to be developed well in advance of the devices that support it. PCIe 7.0 is not coming particularly quickly when compared to past standards.

PCIe 5.0 first draft was out in 2017, final spec released in 2019, platform support first available in 2021, devices that actually supported it on the market in late 2022.

PCIe 6.0 first draft out in 2020, final spec released in 2022, first devices (and hopefully platform support?) out this year.

PCIe 7.0 first draft out in 2024, spec scheduled to be released 2025, devices and platform support out probably a few years after that.

It's not that the standard is moving super quickly, but that because everyone needs to collaborate for the standard to actually be interoperable, you get to see how the sausage is made and so the news about it seems to be out very early.

Any reason a few companies can't leapfrog to the fastest one?

It takes time to design and manufacture chips.