PCI-e 2.0

[S^line]

I was just reading an article today. And i found something about PCI-e 2.0 which is x32. So i was wondering if anyone else has heard of this. Everyone probably has and i just missed it. But if anyone else has any more details input would be appreciated.

 

[Frick]

It's the new PCI-E standard that is .. Not very usable for mere mortals. At least not for the moment. I also read something about 2008, I think..

 

[Ripper3]

I read some specs for the R600, and it might be out of date, or might not be true for the first few, but it has native PCIe 2.0 support, so it might come into use a little before 2008 then... although the PCIe 16x bus isn't used to its full potential just yet I don't think, so we may have time yet.

 

[Ketxxx]

PCI-E 2.0 is a gimmick. It offers very marginal optimisations to the bus routines with its main "selling point" providing vastly more bandwidth, which ultimately is pretty useless considering modern graphics cant come anywhere near using the full bandwidth potential of PCI-E. In fact you could load an existing dual 16 lane PCI-E bus with everything you could, and it would smile, laugh in your face and mock you by asking for more work to do. Oh, then theres the fact you can easily increase PCI-E frequency on modern chiupsets without any stability problems, the only time stability problems will arise is when the PCI-E frequency gets too fast for the VGPU, as typically VGPU's are designed to run @ the default 100MHz - with a little wiggle room catered for somewhere in the region of 10-20MHz or so. As PCI-E 2.0 cards become available that limit will basically entirely be lifted allowing you to increase a PCI-E bus frequency to match PCI-E "2" to near identical bandwidth and performance margins.

 

[DaMulta]

Hey ket what about the part that it will do 150 watts over the bus versus 75watts?

 

[Ketxxx]

Negligable reason to upgrade to PCI-E 2.0. PCI-E can provide enough power, either through the PCI-E slot itself or with the aid of an external power source, such as the 6 pin PCI-E connections most PSUs have now. The underlying reason for PCI-E 2.0 seems to be the increasingly lazy PCB design of graphics cards. Its been proven time and again that ATi and nVidia could make even their flagship models consume significantly less power given a PCB re-design, which would not only obviously be much greener for the environment, but would also cut down electricity bills and PCB size.

 

[S^line]

It's the new PCI-E standard that is .. Not very usable for mere mortals. At least not for the moment. I also read something about 2008, I think..

I heard that Intel will have mobos that use it this year,if i read correctly, and AMD will have them in 2008

 

[Ketxxx]

That said, it still wont be very useful to anyone but 3D movie studios (or the like) who use workstation level graphics cards that cost like $5000+ a pop.

 

[S^line]

That said, it still wont be very useful to anyone but 3D movie studios (or the like) who use workstation level graphics cards that cost like $5000+ a pop.

O, so are you saying that it's going to be more of a specialty slot?

 

[Ketxxx]

No, sadly it will be a standard eventually (read my previous posts if you havent already and you will see why I dont like PCI-E 2.0) just as far as the near future goes (say somewhere between mid and end 2009) you will be hard pushed to see any performance difference between a PCI-E 2 slot and card, vs a PCI-E slot and counterpart card.

 

[S^line]

O, okay. gotcha now.

 

[lemonadesoda]

PCIe 2.0 is a great idea... but IMO they should have waited a year and gone with a bandwidth speedup of x4 not x2. Why?

Well the whole idea is to be able to have much more bandwidth going on a "simple slot", ie the 1 lane slot. So you can run high bandwidth hardware, e.g. RAID or SCSI cards, GB ethernet and fibrechannel. At the moment, a x1 card is pretty useless for these applications. (Single network ok, but for server with 4 or 8 network ports, a 1 lane card just doesnt have the bandwidth)

It also makes manufacturing cheaper... if you can put a 4 lane card into 1 lane, or a 16 lane GPU onto 4 lane.

 

[ARTOSOFT]

Heh... PCIE v2.0. I am still on my AGP card...

Regards,
Arto.

 

[Kursah]

Well, AGP cards released recently are very close if not matching the performance of their PCIe counterparts, at least from what I've seen of ATI, which still asks the question of what the big jump to PCIe in the first place is good for if we can still squeeze similar performance from the old AGP standard. I know the differences and all the big touted specs of PCIe, but what's the point of going to 2.0 when we still can't kill AGP..the only way they can really kill AGP is by making more cards only for PCIe. If ATI didn't make the Rialto chip so well, maybe we wouldn't have this problem! But I'm glad they did anyways!

This should be a sign to ATI/Nvidia that they need to use more efficient PCB's, and keep pusing to max out PCIe bandwidth/performance!! And keep making bridge chips to offer AGP variants!