What can possibly ship for PCIe 5.0 card slots in the next 12 months?

[stotting]

PCIe 5.0 card slots look awesome. However seems like mass adoption of PCI 5.0 slots are required to justify graphics cards being PCI 5.0 - unless PCI 5.0 cards somehow also downgrade to PCI 4.0 when put into a 4.0 slot. Seems like (maybe this is obvious to others) PCI 5 cards have to work in PCI 4 slots - or card makers have to make two version of each card - seems expensive.

To further justify PCI 5 slots for graphics cards on AM5 boards, there must be some feature/crazy performance gains via RDNA 3 PCI 5 and AM5 - otherwise why charge a premium for PCI 5 on the Motherboard?

If there were such gains can we back of the envelop determine what type and range of gains these would be?

[GigaBusterEXE]

5.0 will let cards run at lower lanes, which comes at a silicon space premium, so lower end cards will benefit

[stotting]

Sorry what does lower lanes mean?

[GigaBusterEXE]

like instead of running 16x lanes electrically, running 8x or 4x electrically
the lower the lane count, the less space on the silicon die it takes up, that’s why the 6500XT is only 4x
8x at 5.0 has roughly the same bandwidth as 16x at 4.0

[stotting]

Cool.
Why are the X670E boards all looking at 16x lanes? Why even have an E class of MB this cycle?

Seems like this has to be overkill for at least the next 12 months?

[GigaBusterEXE]

its an endless cycle
mobo manufacturers make dumb decisions because dumb buyers make dumb decisions because mobo manufacturers make dumb decisions

[cowphrase]

It’s an age old problem of implementing a newer standard. Motherboards won’t use a new standard unless cards support it, cards won’t use it unless motherboards support it. So it takes someone with an ulterior motive to incorporate that standard.

Enter Intel and AMD who have new platforms that they want to sell, so they incorporate the newer standards for marketing reasons. Since Intel and AMD implemented PCI-E 5, product vendors are underway making PCI-E 5 devices. (From what I’ve heard, PCI-E 5 SSDs by the start of next year).

Luckily for PCI-E it’s forwards and backwards compatible, so newer cards work in older slots, and older cards work in newer slots.

If no one used newer standards then they risk dying, which can be bad for consumers. Eventually you will require the faster speed, or newer features of the standards. I for one am glad we don’t use parallel printers or serial mice anymore.

[vic]

The immediate candidate that come up in my mind is the upcoming Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs. If AMD don’t migrate them to PCIe 5.0, I really don’t know who else will make the first move in consumer space.

And the immediate benefit of Radeon RX 7000 on PCIe 5.0 is that extreme hard core gamers can install two of the top-end GPUs inside an ATX form factor box. Very very sweet indeed. By that I really meant non-gamers, but ML/3D animation productive users. lol