PCIe® 6.0 Specification and Beyond: Enabling Storage and Machine Learning Applications

For the past three decades, PCI-SIG® has delivered a succession of industry-leading PCI Express® (PCIe®) specifications that remain ahead of the increasing demand for a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect for compute-intensive systems in diverse market segments, including data centers, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), high-performance computing (HPC) and storage applications. In early 2022, PCI-SIG released the PCIe 6.0 specification to members, doubling the data rate of the PCIe 5.0 specification to 64 GT/s (up to 256 GB/s for a x16 configuration). To achieve high data transfer rates with low latency, PCIe 6.0 technology adds innovative new features like Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels (PAM4) signaling, low-latency Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Flit-based encoding. PCIe 6.0 technology is an optimal solution to meet the demands of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning applications, which often require high data bandwidth, low latency transport channels. This presentation will explore the benefits of PCIe 6.0 architecture for storage and AI/ML workloads and its impact on next-generation cloud data centers. Attendees will also learn about the potential AI/ML use cases for PCIe 6.0 technology. Finally, the presentation will provide a preview of what is coming next for PCIe specifications.