All you need to know about PCIe ports in motherboards and their benefits

 

PCIe 4.0 is the fourth version of the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express port. Pcie 5.0 is the fifth generation of it, which is used to connect external devices to the motherboard in order to operate the computer and improve its performance. These devices include the GPU graphics battery and Wi-Fi, Ethernet cards, SSD, and more. PCIe version 4 offers better performance and faster speed than the previous generation, as it doubles the available bandwidth of the devices through which it is connected. It is important to know more about it before assembling a gaming computer in 2022.

 

For those who do not know what the PCIe port is, it is a relatively new type of port on the motherboard for connecting external devices, and it was introduced by Intel in 2004 to replace the regular accessory port, and of course, it provides better performance and much faster speed as it is constantly updated, as it appeared from it PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 versions during the past two years, and below we introduce you to these two versions and the features of each of them in detail.

 

Specifications for different versions of PCIe

 

PCIe 4.0 ports consist of a single lane or multiples of four lanes such as x1, x4, x8, x16, and x32. As the lanes double, the bandwidth is also doubled for each generation from the previous one, for example, PCIe 3.0 x8 can be replaced by the third generation With PCIe 4.0 x4 generation 4 with the same performance despite the difference in the number of lanes between them, and here is the bandwidth, speed and some important information for the PCIe port from version 1 to version 5:

 

First PCIe 1.0:

 

● Bandwidth: 8 GB/s

● Transfer rate: 2.5 GT/s

● Frequency: 2.5GHz

● Encoder: 8b/10b

 Second PCIe 2.0:

 

● Bandwidth: 16 GB/s

● Transfer rate: 5GHz

● Frequency: 5.0 GHz

● Encoder: 8b/10b

Third PCIe 3.0:

 

● Bandwidth: 32GB/s

● Transfer rate: 8GHz

● Frequency: 8GHz

● Encoder: 128b/130b

Fourth PCIe 4.0:

 

● Bandwidth: 64GB/s

● Transfer rate: 16GHz

● Frequency: 16GHz

● Encoder: 128b/130b

V PCIe 5.0:

 

● Bandwidth: 128GB/s

● Transfer rate: 32GHz

● Frequency: 32GHz

● Encoder: 128b/130b

 

Compatibility of different versions of PCIe

 

 

Despite the obvious differences in specifications between previous versions, newer versions such as PCIe 4.0 maintain backward compatibility, meaning that PCIe 3.0 cards still work on motherboards that support, and PCIe 4.0 cards will work on motherboards that support PCIe 3.0 but it will work with lower specifications, ie PCIe 3.0 specification.

 

The third generation PCIe 3.0 was launched in 2010, and its successor generation PCIe 4.0 was released in 2017, about seven years after the previous generation, and in January 2019 AMD announced that the X570 motherboard will support PCIe 4.0, and motherboard manufacturers will be able to Also from updating motherboard firmware on about 300 and 400 motherboards in order to get partial support for PCIe 4.0 instead of full support. Also in January 2019, Taiwanese chip maker Prison announced the world's first PCIe 4.0 SSD, which had read speeds of 4 GB / s and 4.2 GB / s.

 

5th generation: PCIe 5

 

The fifth version PCIe 5 comes with better specifications than its previous generations, as it comes with a much faster speed and higher frequency, and was officially announced in May 2019, PCIe 5 has provided a lot of long-awaited capabilities for system designers, specifically those who create new cloud-based applications and applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but do you know why?

 

The reason for this is that PCIe 5 offers twice the bit rate of its previous generation PCIe 4 at 32 GB/s versus 16 GB/s for PCIe 4, and PCIe 5 also has the advantage that its higher transfer rates allow system designers to balance Simpler bandwidth requirements by working with fewer lanes for specific applications such as 40GigE and SSD, and more demanding high-bandwidth applications such as AI and ML can take full advantage of the x16 lane.

 

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Not only that, but the huge capabilities available in the system can allow system designers to have more important advantages, as PCIe 5 is probably considered the technological cornerstone of the interfaces (Interconnect), for example, Intel announced earlier that the interconnection The Compute express Link (CXL) cache thread will use the standard PCIe 5 physical layer (PHY) specification.