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Although we still haven't gotten PCI express 5.0 devices

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in our hot little hands yet, believe it or not, the PCIe 6.0 specification

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has already been released. And as you may have guessed, it's insanely fast.

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At 126 gigabytes per second one way on an X16 link,

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it's twice as fast as 5.0, four times as fast as 4.0,

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which is fairly new on the market, and eight times faster than the 3.0 devices

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many of us idiots are currently using.

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But how do they make it so fast? And more importantly, does it have real relevance for you, the home user,

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or is it just overkill? To find out, we spoke with Dibendra Dash Sharma,

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an Intel fellow in their data platforms group, and we'd like to thank him for lending his time

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and expertise. So unsurprisingly, PCI express 6.0 is backwards compatible

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with all the previous generations of PCIe, but if you go all the way back to version 1.0,

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you could only get up to four gigabytes per second one way from an X16 slot.

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Now, we're pushing 32 times as much data

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through the same link. Older revisions of PCIe express got faster and faster

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because they increased their transmission frequencies, but it turns out you can only do this so much

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before the signal becomes super unstable. It's kind of similar to how a 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi connection

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is faster than a 2.4 gig link, but it's also not as stable at long distances.

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So instead, PCIe 6 uses a technique called PAM4,

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which can actually carry two bits of data at the same time instead of just one.

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Unlike traditional signaling, where one voltage represented a zero

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and a second voltage represented a one, PAM4 uses four different voltages,

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and each one corresponds to either 00, 01, 10, or 11,

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meaning twice as much data is sent per unit of time.

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However, shoving more stuff through the pipes is, just like in regular life, not the greatest idea.

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In this case, it increases the rate of errors, and even with the PCIe special interest group

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adding a few nanoseconds of latency to reduce the error rate to about one bit per million,

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that's still a lot of potential errors when you consider how much data flows

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through a typical PCIe express link. However, a few bytes in each chunk of data that's sent

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are reserved for error checking and correction. If the receiving device sees that a packet is incorrect,

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it can ask for it again using just a few bytes of data.

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Because this error correcting scheme is quite lightweight, it only adds a very small amount of latency.

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So this way, PCIe 6.0 can operate at very high speeds

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without constantly losing signal integrity. In fact, it's estimated that instead of an error rate

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of one bit in a million, PCIe 6.0 can operate

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with only one unfixed error every billion, billion hours.

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So you'll probably never have to worry about it unless you're an elf from Middle Earth.

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But Riley, hold on a minute. All this performance is fine and good,

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but my graphics card doesn't even saturate the PCIe express slot in my computer today.

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Why should I care about this? Well, one reason is that as we continue to ask

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for more and more out of our devices, having the fattest pike possible,

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will ensure that we can do things like hit our SSDs with mega-sized downloads, stream 4K and 8K HDR video,

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and keep up with the ever-increasing demands video games put on our graphics cards all at the same time.

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But going beyond just your home PC, think of all the cloud services you utilize

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on a daily basis for applications from voice assistance

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to IoT devices to self-driving cars. Well, assuming you can afford one.

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All these gadgets need a high bandwidth interface that can process data with minimal latency.

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Think of an autonomous car that quickly has to get data from a camera to a CPU to a 5G modem,

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which then goes into a server somewhere that has to respond quickly to aid and hazard recognition

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and is also moving data around internally for machine learning.

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That's a lot of data. On both ends of that connection,

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PCI-Express 6.0 could deliver enough speed to make the experience seamless

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and maybe even tell you about an icy road ahead before you end up in the ditch.

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All right, that's it for this video, guys. Thanks for watching. Like the video if you liked it. Dislike it if you disliked it.

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Check out our other videos. We got lots. Comment below with video suggestions

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so we can make even more. And don't forget to subscribe and follow

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