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PCI Express 3.0 Delayed Till 2011

Posted by timothy on from the dreamliner-of-connections dept.

Professor_Quail writes "PC Magazine reports that the PCI SIG has officially delayed the release of the PCI Express 3.0 specification until the second quarter of 2010. Originally, the PCI Express 3.0 specification called for the spec itself to be released this year, with products due about a year after the spec's release, or in 2010."

20 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Delayed the release? by jhfry · · Score: 4, Funny

    So the spec is complete, but were not gonna tell you what it says!

    Doesn't make sense!

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    1. Re:Delayed the release? by impaledsunset · · Score: 4, Funny

      They are just giving time to Amazon's EC2/S3 to get compliant.

    2. Re:Delayed the release? by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Informative

      So the spec is complete, but were not gonna tell you what it says!

      Doesn't make sense!

      The article says they're working on getting it to be backward compliant with the current PCIe specs. You probably don't want to start building to the spec until that's in place anyway. You can find a lot of information on PCIe 3.0 on the FAQ on their site. If you're a member of PCI SIG, you might even be able to get the preliminary spec, who knows?

      --
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    3. Re:Delayed the release? by hairyfeet · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Personally I am quite glad they are delaying it until it is fully backwards compatible. Most folks here are probably too young to remember the "fun" of having hardware not be backwards compatible. Hell during the "fun" days of proprietary everything we even had things such as "Compaq RAM" that would only work in a Compaq board and even then only with certain boards that matched the particular quirks Compaq had built in! What fun! What joy!

      At least today RAM is RAM, PCI is PCI, and USB is USB. It is so much easier now that everything is built to spec and is backwards compatible. Just the other day I had to plug my USB 2.0 thumbdrive into a USB 1.0 port on an old office machine to snatch off some files before fixing it. in the old nothing is compatible days that would have been a royal PITA to get to work, if you could get it to work at all, but thanks to the specs being backward compatible I was easily able to snatch the relevant files, even if it was slow as Xmas. And don't think it couldn't happen in the modern time, because you've never had the "fun" of AGP 2, 4, and 8 where....damn I can't remember the formula anymore. I think it was a 2 could work in a 4, and a 4 could work sometimes in an 8, but an 8 couldn't work in a 2. Something like that. I for one would rather wait and not have to remember stupid formulas like that again, thanks ever so much.

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    4. Re:Delayed the release? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Personally I am quite glad they are delaying it until it is fully backwards compatible.

      Umm dude this is slashdot. The correct response is "This new standard sucks. It would be 10x faster if they didn't worry about back compatibility cruft" from a bunch of people who didn't understand the old standard but have been told it was really complex.

      A good example would be x64 replacing x86. Every single nerd on the internet knows that x86 is bloated and that x64 should have started from scratch, despite the fact that a look at a picture of the die of a modern processor shows that the actually CPU core is completely dwarfed by cache. Oh and lots of people including Intel have built RISC and VLIW chips without the x86 legacy stuff and they didn't turn out to have a long term performance advantage over the 'crufty' x86. Actually the cruft on x86 is a slightly larger hardware decode unit for frequently used instructions compared to RISC. Still x86 instructions take up less room in memory and thus in the cache. It could well be that it's cheaper to build a larger decoder than it would be to increase the cache size to fit the same number of RISC instructions in it.

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  2. whats in 3.0? by convolvatron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the pci sig blurb says its mostyl cleanup and the removal of 5v support

    does anyone know of anything interesting in 3.0?

    1. Re:whats in 3.0? by symbolset · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Twice as fast again. x16 is 32GB/s. They're looking to support 3 graphics cards per PC, which is cool if you're into that whole supercomputer on your desk thing, but it's going to burn at least a kilowatt.

      I'm sad we haven't seen external PCIe implemented. It was in the v2 specification. The idea of an external interconnect with that much bandwidth probably made some heavy players nervous.

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    2. Re:whats in 3.0? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      http://www.ni.com/pxi/mxiexpress/

    3. Re:whats in 3.0? by AndrewNeo · · Score: 2, Informative

      As the AC above me referenced, National Instruments uses PCI-e for a lot of their backplane communications in their equipment.

    4. Re:whats in 3.0? by seifried · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They're looking to support 3 graphics cards per PC

      Interesting, I just read the specs on my motherboard which has 4 slots for video cards, granted with 4 slots used it's only 8x (which is ok since I live in 2d land) but with 3 or less in use they're all 16x (well, so it claims), so it would seem that's already covered.

    5. Re:whats in 3.0? by bobcat7677 · · Score: 2, Informative

      There have been and still are a few implementations of external pci express. But they have all been prohibitively expensive and somewhat "special purpose". Besides ones already mentioned there is also several product options from http://www.magma.com/ Be prepared to drop a Grover Cleveland to get one.

    6. Re:whats in 3.0? by symbolset · · Score: 2, Funny

      Holy cow, that's what I was looking for, thanks! The Magma ExpressBox7. $2800 for 7 x4 electical, x16 physical slots and a x4 host adapter with cable, rackmount. That's why I like Slashdot.

      This enables some interesting configurations of those 1TB PCIe attached SSDs.

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  3. Re:Whatever by Old97 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, and I've got 640k of ram. All I'll ever need.

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  4. strange self-reference by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Funny

    the PCI Express 3.0 specification called for the spec itself to be released this year

    Now we know how time loops are accidentally created.

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  5. Re:Who cares by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm guessing that PCIe 3 isn't really aimed at people playing games on single socket systems with outdated graphics cards. It probably isn't really aimed at desktops, at present.

    Cluster interconnects, high speed storage attachment, and various flavors of coprocessors are always hungry for more bandwidth.

  6. Re:Who cares by Amouth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    but isnt' that the point of making it a channelized system? where each channel is full duplex? they can jsut add more channels as needed.

    16x - 20x - 24x - 32x

    you can plug a 1x or 4x card in a 16x slot and have it work - hell if you wanted to you could make a 3x card..

    adding more available channels on the slot is much less of a change to it than PICX was to PCI.. and that actualy turned out to work quite well..

    i'm all for increasing the speed of interconnects - but adding more lanes seems to work just as well - jsut costs alittle more in terms of copper..

    --
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  7. Re:Who cares by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Being able to add channels is certainly handy; but it isn't really a substitute for increasing speeds. If it were, we'd still be using PCI-X. Particularly in space constrained systems(laptops, blades, etc.) running more connectors and more traces is neither easy nor cheap. Even in your basic desktop ATX boards, you'd be hard pressed to get much more than a 16X slot without impinging on the RAM slots, or the CPU cooler area, or some other part.

    For the moment, at least, our ability to drive wires faster at low cost seems to be increasing substantially more quickly than our ability to run more wires at low cost.

  8. Re:Good Cause Creative still cant handle PCIe now! by Manip · · Score: 4, Informative

    Creative purchased their drivers off of a third party company and then just updated them over the years. This literally happened since the soundriver products began. Once Vista came out with an entirely new sound infrastructure nobody at Creative had the expertise to write a decent driver so they cobbled one together (with Microsoft's help) from their old horrible drivers.

    Fact is - Creative soundscards aren't worth while because the drivers are so poor. Even if the sound hardware could potentially take load off of the CPU, you're more likely to spend endless hours messing with it and even if it does work it won't work as effectively as one might hope.

  9. Re:Whatever by Urkki · · Score: 2, Funny

    PCI Express 2.0 has more bandwidth than anyone will ever need

    It might have more bandwidth than hardly anyone will ever need before 2011... So start saving, 2011 you'll be paying blood for your new PCIe 3.0 graphics card!

  10. Re:Till, until and 'til by Mozk · · Score: 2, Informative

    Epic fail with the title? A "till" is a cash register, something you put money into. Do they mean 'til, short for until.

    Til(l) was the original form of the word. The redundant prefix un(d) was added later, and nowadays people mistake till as a shortened version of until, which gives 'til. So, there's nothing wrong with the headline.

    http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=till
    http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=until

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