PCIe 6.0: You Might Have to Wait Years for It, While 5.0 Spreads!

General news News Tech Tech News 06/16/2025

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TECH NEWS – PCIe 5.0 SSDs will have plenty of time to become widely available at reasonable prices.

It’s no surprise that PCIe 5.0 SSDs are here to stay. They’re not only newer and faster than their predecessors, but there simply isn’t enough demand for even faster consumer drives yet. While PCIe 5.0 nearly doubles the transfer speed of 4.0, most users won’t notice much of a real-world difference. The mainstream market still hasn’t widely adopted the current standard, and it will take years before PCIe 5.0 becomes the norm.

Wallace Kou, CEO of Silicon Motion (SMI), stated that PC OEMs currently have little interest in PCIe 6.0, with both AMD and Intel reportedly having no plans to support it anytime soon. With PCIe 5.0 performing strongly and SMI already leading in the sector, the company sees no need to accelerate development of 6.0-compatible SSD controllers.

Kou noted that even PCIe 5.0 controller development has become less competitive due to its high production costs. A single tape-out can be twice as expensive as for PCIe 4.0 SSDs once IP and mask costs are included. Transitioning to PCIe 6.0 would be even pricier, with next-gen controllers expected to cost 25–30% more than 5.0 ones. These new controllers will feature 16 NAND channels and be built on a 4nm node, pushing tape-out costs as high as $30–$40 million, compared to $16–$20 million for PCIe 5.0.

The earliest PCIe 6.0 SSDs are expected to debut in late 2027 or 2028, primarily targeting the enterprise market. One driver is Nvidia’s planned launch of its Rubin platform by the end of 2026. However, for general consumers, PCIe 6.0 offers little practical value. Most users still lack PCIe 5.0-compatible setups, and even among those who do, few notice performance differences compared to 4.0.

Adopting PCIe 6.0 will only push system costs higher, and current motherboards are already expensive due to PCIe 5.0 integration. Regardless, it seems likely that PCIe 5.0 SSDs will continue to dominate the market for at least the next five years.

Source: WCCFTech, Tom’s Hardware

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Angyal Anikó

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