(Credit: Micron)
It's been a few years since the official PCIe 6.0 specifications were finalized, but Micron just launched the first design. The Micron 9650 SSDs can reach sustained read speeds as high as 28Gbps and sequential write up to 14Gbps, with up to 5.5 million IOPS for random reads. However, all of that performance is rather meaningless for most of us because these drives are designed exclusively for AI data centers, TechRadar reports.
Although the latest PCIe 5 SSDs are incredibly fast, doubling the performance of PCIe 4, you'll only shave a second or two off your game load times, and very few consumers are throwing tens of gigabytes between these drives on a regular basis. So, even if Micron did launch PCIe 6.0 SSDs for consumers as well, it's debatable how many people would really be interested. On top of the fact that we'll be waiting for next-generation CPUs and motherboards to support it, too.
But the support is already there in AI data centers, and they're ready and willing to take advantage. Higher bandwidth can reduce CPU cycle demands and AI latency. The new drives are said to be more efficient, too, allowing them to operate at scale with a lower energy footprint, in turn making the data centers cheaper to run.
(Credit: Micron)Cooling requirements will rise, though. The new Micron drives support both air-cooled and liquid-cooled solutions, depending on the particular deployment, and that extra speed will mean greater heat output. TechPowerUp reports that Micron conducted 18-month interoperability testing with these drives to make sure they can continue to work effectively when used consistently at high speeds. OEMs and AI data center customers will now look to validate the drives in real-world deployments to enhance AI training and inferencing workloads.
The official specifications of the drives make them 100% faster at sustained reads than PCIe 5 alternatives, with up to 40% faster write speeds. Random read and write times are also significantly faster, at 67% and 22% higher, respectively. This helps it deliver much higher transfer rates per watt, though that doesn't necessarily equate to enormous efficiency savings in its own right; the drive is just much faster.
As much as this technology doesn't have use for consumers right now, that will likely change in the years to come. Afterall, NVMe SSD performance just improved on Windows 11 because Microsoft finally stopped using a SCSI translation layer and added native support. Who knows what future SSDs will be able to do as developers begin to take better advantage of everyone gaming and working on ultra-fast SSDs?