Hardware

PCIe

The lane-based serial bus standard that connects graphics cards, SSDs and other components to the motherboard.

// EXPLANATION

Each generation roughly doubles bandwidth: Gen4 is about 2 GB/s per lane and Gen5 about 4 GB/s (per direction). Graphics cards typically use x16 and NVMe SSDs use x4 lanes.

// ALSO KNOWN AS

PCIePCI ExpressPCI-E

// RELATED TERMS

NVMeThe storage protocol that lets SSDs work over PCIe with many parallel command queues. GPU (graphics processing unit)A processor with thousands of small cores that performs the same operation on lots of data in parallel, used for graphics and AI computation. BandwidthThe maximum amount of data a bus or memory can transfer per second (GB/s).

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