Considering we're barely anywhere near saturating a PCIe 2.0 link at the moment; Planning for 4.0 to be four times as fast is just overkill. Give us motherboards that can handle multiple 16x links instead, rather than falling over and chopping back to 8x if you go above two cards. Although that kind of speed would be very, very fun to run a PCIe 4.0 based Revodrive off. Up to 8GB/s reads, anyone?
Since it's designed to be twice as fast as PCIe 3.0 you can have an 8x PCIe 4.0 slot which performs the same as a 16x PCI 3.0 slot. Controllers won't need to be designed to handle as many lanes and motherboard manufacturers won't need to design around the physical connections of the extra lanes. It's a win/win.
Only if you are assuming that GPU don't get faster over the years until PCI-E 4.0 gets wide spread, and the GPU actually takes advantage of it.
Would've thought that something that's gunna be power hungry won't really be welcome on anything portable? And yeh, we've barely saturated, well, I'd go as far as to say PCI-E 3, not so sure about 4. Probably another number that people remeber when they buy their new smartphone as flashy...ignorant fools! Edit : Reading some more, same power, backwards compat, same hardware even...seems unreal...price? :O
We don't even have PCI-E 3.0 cards yet.. LOL I agree with Bindi.. more 16X lanes would be better. If I so much as put a sound card in a 1x slot one of my cards defaults to 8x. That sucks. Even that doesn't really effect performance though, which shows you how pointless 4.0 is right now.
The keynote seems to highlight the mobile market as the main target though. Having a PCIe x1 gen 4 link would give 16gbps of throughput while consuming far less physical board space (at a premium in such devices). Alternatively, it opens up the options for switching/ bridge chips on current gen. equipment. A processor with only 16 gen 4 lanes can be connected to an appropriate switch chip to provide 4 x16 gen 2 lanes for 4 graphics accelerators and/or devices.
in conclusion ....is that good or bad < scratches head> lol .. ? I assume its good huh ? if not .. oh thats dreadful .. (please delete as applicable, or I will re read when not so tired)
