Having wrapped up their work on the PCI-Express 5.0 specification earlier this year, the PCI-SIG wasted no time in getting to work on the next version of the specification, PCIe 6.0. That specification, which is expected to be finished in 2021, will once again double PCIe’s bandwidth to 64 GigaTransfers/second – or roughly 128GB/sec (each direction) for a x16 slot – thanks to some high-end encoding technologies like PAM4.

At the time that PCIe 6.0 was first announced, the group was just beginning work on the specification. And now a few scant months later, the group has released a brief update, announcing that they have already completed version 0.3 of the new spec.

The announcement itself is light on technical details, as the design goals and major underlying technologies for PCIe 6.0 were announced at the very start of the project. However the organization is keen to ensure that PCIe development continues moving at a steady pace, to avoid repeating the long gap between 3.0 and 4.0.

And the group’s members will certainly be busy. Even with the 0.3 specification in hand, it’s going to be nearly another two years before the specification is done, reflecting on the fact that there’s a lot of work left to be done to solve the technical challenges in developing PCIe 6.0, and bringing new signaling standards into the specification while maintaining backwards compatibility.