The carrot and stick marketing approach to hardware evolution is a bit silly. Evolutionary change in tech sold as the next Jesus tech gets old after awhile. Next year it'll be telling you why the dots on your TV aren't small enough and you must need 8K now. In 2022, they'll say the dots on your 8K aren't bright enough or the blacks are too muddy and sell you OLED variant. In 2023 they'll come out with a 240hz version because apparently the sync tearing was apocalyptic. Keep chasing that carrot everyone. 

soo we have pci-e express 6? in 2021?
 

mobhill
 
You just want to get 2020 over with! 

 
Yes... because it means Zen 4 will be closer  A GPU is one thing, but buying into Zen 3 would be an entire new rig and I hate doing that right before inflection points. Zen 4 will have several inflection points going for it and will be a good platform to buy into. Must resist that Zen 3 temptation...
 

Miguell
soo we have pci-e express 6? in 2021?
 

Not 6, but we will see 5 if Intel can meet it's launch timetables. That's a big if  Both of them will have consumer+server PCIe 5.0 in 2022 from the looks of it. 

just straight out skipping 5? niceee 

It is being certified in 2021. Very different then launch

This reminds me, isn't a new memory standard launching as well; DDR5?

Wait so is it good to buy a motherboard right now if I can wait?

mathematical
Wait so is it good to buy a motherboard right now if I can wait?

PCIe 4.0 came out in 2017, but Intel have yet to release a HEDT CPU for it (Intel Rocket Lake is due Q1 2021 with PCIe 4.0), and AMD launched their first PCIe 4.0 CPUs in mid-late 2019, so I'm guessing it will be a few years before we see PCIe 6.0 in any gaming CPUs. I am waiting for Rocket Lake before I decide to upgrade, so unless you really need to right now, I'd wait and see how Rocket Lake looks and then make a decision between that and AMD.
 

GPUs are clearly not utilizing the 3.0 and 4.0 bandwidth we already have. But I wonder what the speed of 5.0 or 6.0 could do for other devices? Better read/write speeds for name? Better local networking?

What do you think would see the biggest benefit from this extra bandwidth?

mathematical
Wait so is it good to buy a motherboard right now if I can wait?

 
Depends if you're going to buy today's CPUs later, or were wanting chips for next year. Zen 4 will be a new socket, and Rocket Lake will be the last on the current LGA1200 socket.
 

Gallus85
What do you think would see the biggest benefit from this extra bandwidth?

SSDs, because they are limited to x4 lanes. Otherwise nothing really needs PCIe 5 bandwidth for consumer tech... A single x1 PCIe 4.0 link already well exceeds the bandwidth from a 10G NIC, so 5 won't do anything there. Getting a bit worried about the power draw/cost of PCIE 6 though, 5 will already be high and 6 will increase it still more because of PAM4 signaling.