PCI Express 4.0 promises twice the bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0 -- in 2014 or 2015

PCI Express 3.0 is barely out the door, but that hasn't stopped the PCI-SIG consortium from unveiling the initial specs for PCI Express 4.0, which promises tons of bandwidth for graphics cards when it's finalized two or three years from now.

Gamers will be most interested in how much bandwidth the new standard will provide their video cards for graphics crunching, and PCIe 4.0 should deliver 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s), or about double the rate of PCI Express 3.0 (which had already doubled bandwidth of PCIe 2.0). It will also be backwards compatible with previous PCIe generations.

The timing for the announcement is somewhat curious, because PCI Express 3.0 is only becoming a spec worth watching with the launch of Intel's new X79 chipset. Of course, there isn't an ecosystem that even supports PCIe 3.0 yet, so you might be waiting up to 5 years for some PCIe 4.0 goodness. Who knows what the computing landscape will look like by then?

[Via VR-Zone]