Other PCI-Express 4.0

PCIe 4.0 is on its way.
The first products are AMD Vega 20 and a Samsung 8TB NVMe PCIe 4.0
Will this have any benefit other than bandwidth?
Are we getting motherboard support from Intel or AMD any time soon?

 

In the enterprise space advertising stuff as PCI-e 4 compatible is nothing new, Mellanox for example has been doing so for quite a while already.

There is no sign of Consumer CPUs / Mainboards supporting it in either 2018 or 2019.

AMD plans to keep the current AM4 platform alive up to and including Zen3 in 2020 and that has even sparked rumours that AMD will skip PCI-e 4 on the consumer side completely and go straight from 3 to 5 around 2021 or so.

When it comes to Intel, first they will shrink their existing consumer CPUs, so any significant new features can be ruled out for 2018 and 2019, maybe they'll add PCI-e 4 in 2020.

On the server side of things it could potentially arrive sooner (in particular from Intel who have the resources to deviate more significantly between consumer and enterprise products), I wouldn't completely rule out a 14nm Xeon with PCI-e 4 in 2019.

 

That's a pity, it would be nice to be able to have more bandwidth for devices. 2 lanes of PCIe 4.0 would be enough for current storage needs. I can imaging motherboards with 4x M.2 slots on the backside.

 

I'd rather see Oculink or whatever it's called come to the consumer space... replace the unwieldy slots with DP-like connectors and cables...

Helps get away from ATX and makes SFF potentially more interesting by giving more freedom over what components you can put where...

 

I don't know about Vega, but the NGSFF drive including PCIe 4.0 was just a typo, it is only PCIe 3.0 x4.
There are so vanishingly few situations where you are actually limited by PCIe link bandwidth that I can't see there being any demand for it in the consumer space.

Ditto, OCuLink even at PCIe 3.0 is exiting as it allows flexible placement of components.

 

I know i've seen server boards with it, but iirc it's limited to PCI-E 3.0 x8... but it still seems a neater solution than this:

 

PCI-E 4.0 x8 would be enough for a GPU

 

3.0 x8 probably would be too tbh

 

Even 3.0 x4 has very little impact.