The new standard is a significant achievement for the PCI Special Interest Group, which reached its goal of doubling PCI Express speeds every three years since starting the spec in 2003. In this case, it did so using an entirely different signaling technology called PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels).
I won’t bombard you with the technical details (those who are interested can learn more here), but the folks at AnandTech say the change is “arguably the largest in the history of the standard.” And not only does it enable faster speeds, but it enables low-latency operation.
When it arrives, PCIe 6.0 will be backward-compatible with existing hardware, so components that use PCIe 5.0 or earlier will work just fine when connected to a PCIe 6.0 host and vice versa.
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The new standard arrives to address the increasing applications requiring high-bandwidth, low-latency data transfers. Commercial markets have a greater need and the budgets required to be early adopters of PCIe 6.0, but eventually, the standard will find its way into consumer products like graphics cards and SSDs—just in time, I’m sure, for PCIe 7.0.