The GIGABYTE breach keeps on giving. According to the latest documents that have hit the web following the manufacturer’s lapse in security, AMD’s next motherboards will seemingly lack support for the next generation of PCI-Express, PCIe 5.0.
This can be observed in one of the block diagrams that was leaked for red team’s AM5 chipset and socket. There is no indication of PCIe 5.0 anywhere in the diagram, but it does suggest that 600 Series motherboards will offer additional PCIe 4.0 lanes over current models.
What’s interesting is that Intel’s upcoming 12th Gen Core processors, Alder Lake, will feature support for PCI Express 5.0 to some extent. This has been confirmed in slides that were shared earlier this week during the company’s Architecture Day 2021 event.
The lack of PCIe 5.0 support with Ryzen 7000 Series “Zen 4” processors may not be as bad as it sounds, however. This is because today’s fastest SSDs barely stress the limits of PCIe 4.0, which features a link speed of 16 GT/s and aggregate bandwidth of up to 63.02 (x16).
PCIe 5.0 boasts double the speed of PCIe 4.0.
[…] AMD had extensively marketed the fact that it was first-to-market with PCI-Express Gen 4, over a year ahead of Intel’s “Rocket Lake” processor. The platform block-diagram for Socket AM5 states that the AM5 SoC puts out a total of 28 PCI-Express Gen 4 lanes. 16 of these are allocated toward PCI-Express discrete graphics, 4 toward a CPU-attached M.2 NVMe slot, another 4 lanes toward a discrete USB4 controller, and the remaining 4 lanes as chipset-bus.
Source: TechPowerUp