HC9001 PCIe 5.0 controller (Image credit: IThome)

According to a report by Chinese media IThome, Jiangsu Huacun Electronic Technology has demoed its PCIe 5.0 controller at the 2019 Nantong New Generation Information Technology Expo. The memory and storage manufacturer is optimistic that the controller will be in mass-production by the end of 2020.

It was only this year that computer hardware started to arrive with support for the PCIe 4.0 standard. Presently, PCIe 4.0 is still limited to AMD's current Ryzen desktop CPUs, Ryzen Threadripper HEDT (high-end desktop) CPU line and Epyc server processor portfolio. Intel has yet to board the PCIe 4.0 train, but is expected to do so soon.

Interface Introduction Date Transfer Rate Total Bandwidth Encoding PCIe 1.0 2003 2.5 GT/s 8 GB/s 8b/10b PCIe 2.0 2007 5 GT/s 16 GB/s 8b/10b PCIe 3.0 2010 8 GT/s ~32 GB/s 128b/130b PCIe 4.0 2017 16 GT/s ~64 GB/s 128b/130b PCIe 5.0 2019 32 GT/s ~128 GB/s 128b/130b PCIe 6.0 2021 64 GT/s ~256 GB/s PAM-4

Little is known about the HC9001 PCIe 5.0 controller. It's reportedly produced with the 12nm manufacturing process by the China National Research Institute and Jiangsu Huacun Electronic Technology. The HC9001, which is China's first domestic PCIe 5.0 controller, is gaining a lot of buzz, so perhaps we'll get more information as time progresses.

The PCIe 5.0 standard promises to deliver a throughput up to 128 GBps over a x16 slot. This is double the bandwidth of what the PCIe 4.0 interface can do. At this point, PCIe 5.0 would be overkill for the average consumer, considering that today's mainstream graphics cards and SSDs aren't fast enough to use PCIe 4.0 to its max potential. However, PCIe 5.0 will certainly be a welcomed progression in the cloud computing, big data, AI and 5G industries.

An unconfirmed Intel roadmap shows the chipmaker adopting the PCIe 5.0 standard with its forthcoming Sapphire Rapids enterprise-grade processors in 2021. So far, we haven't heard anything about PCIe 5.0 on the AMD front.