Hasn't every generation of PCI-e doubled the bandwidth of the previous now?

I'm more concerned/intrigued by the new connector, though I guess that could lead to a forced upgrade path in time?

I suspect that the old slot can handle the bandwidth but additional logic on new gen cards will be needed to handle additional slots
 
Gaming boxes can make do with PCI Express 1.0 slots, DDR3 is not so fast that it needs more bandwidth to copy artwork to a video card
 

IMHO, they really shouldn't be calling this PCIe 4.0 if the slot design is changing. It should be PCI<something> 1.0.

Did i read ir right the channel is longer? Funny considering gpu are getting smaller but the channel larger.

seta8967
Did i read ir right the channel is longer? Funny considering gpu are getting smaller but the channel larger.

Maybe they are going to pass more power as in wattage. Be nice to dump power wires to our graphic cards.

+3 on no GPU ext power.

seta8967
Did i read ir right the channel is longer? Funny considering gpu are getting smaller but the channel larger.

Sounded like it is longer because it needs existing circuitry for backwards compatibility plus new circuitry for future higher bandwidth design. The article also mentioned data over optical fiber as a possibility in the future, so I assume that it will have a segment of the longer slot fitted with the necessary hardware to make an optical coupling.

Julian_Moore_III

knightsilver
+3 on no GPU ext power.

That would be glorious.  That is one thing I did like about the 290 series no bridges.  Could you imagine wireless bridgeless sli setup.

I can't wait for the day we have no external power, no SLI bridges, single slot waterblocks and dtx motherboard become a new standard instead of itx.
 
Imagine ASRock X99 in dtx format, a corsair 250d could fit a 8-core cpu, and 2 watercooled gpu's in a single compact form. And there would be far less wires and cables if power was from the mobo.

seta8967
I doubt that unless we have a bunch of power cables to our mobo. Would be nice. Maybe when we have 150w top end cards we could do that. Unfortunately Nvidia is the only ones going into power effecient cards.

nah they can do it, if you remember when we went PCIe, AGP cards could do a max of 40W if the slot meet 100% specifications but when we got near 35W is when we got external power adaptors, PCIe slots do 75W, yet the 20pin ATX connector is able to supply a PCIe card, used it myself to test back in 2008 with an 8800GT Green on a 939 board with a 20pin PSU. It ran fine, no big problems. The PSU's can do it, its up to the motherboard guys to add the wiring, but they could in theory supply 300-350W to the PCIe slot.

candle_86

seta8967
I doubt that unless we have a bunch of power cables to our mobo. Would be nice. Maybe when we have 150w top end cards we could do that. Unfortunately Nvidia is the only ones going into power effecient cards.

nah they can do it, if you remember when we went PCIe, AGP cards could do a max of 40W if the slot meet 100% specifications but when we got near 35W is when we got external power adaptors, PCIe slots do 75W, yet the 20pin ATX connector is able to supply a PCIe card, used it myself to test back in 2008 with an 8800GT Green on a 939 board with a 20pin PSU. It ran fine, no big problems. The PSU's can do it, its up to the motherboard guys to add the wiring, but they could in theory supply 300-350W to the PCIe slot.

Nope. 192 watts is the max that a 24-pin motherdboard connector can supply to 12v loads. This is a combined total too! The motherboard would need additional connectors to supply enough current to graphics cards if they wanted to get rid of external graphics card power cables. They would want to place those PCI-E power connectors close to the PCI-E slots to save space since those traces would need to be rather large in size and wouldn't want to waste space over a long distance. Kind of defeats the purpose. Plugging in power to each graphics card which needs it (as we currently do) makes more sense in the long run. Plus, in order to increase signal frequencies and increase bandwidth in general, removing high current loads from the motherboard is necessary. Adding high current traces to the motherboard would decrease signal throughput and defeat the purpose even more.

Maybe I'm out of the nerd loop, but why haven't we moved away from PCH<USB<USB_Port vs PCIe 16x<CPU? Few have complained about input_lag like I have imagetearing/ghosting.

For the GPU,
CPU<PCIe 16x<GPU<Displayport<Monitor

mouse/Keyboard,
CPU<PCH(platform controller hub)<USB Hub<USB_Port<Mouse\Keyboard


We push faster/beefier buses and gpu's, but we had less lag with ISA Bus. Give us higher res monitors but no higher Hz, give us IPS and still push poor quality TN panels in monitors/TV's, but give us IPS/better PPI for phones, sometimes I feel we had better tech that just worked back in the 80's and 90's vs poor quality crap, but wait, it's faster and pretty, but isn't worth a dern...