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> The term gigatransfers per second is essentially Gb/s

It's not really that either because PCIe 2.0 was "5GT/s" despite being only 4 gigabits per second.

You could make some kind of argument about pre- and post-encoding bits, but that still falls down in other circumstances. Gigabit ethernet has five voltage levels per lane, 125 milllion times a second. What's its MT/s if the answer isn't 125?

> the 256 GB/s is for a PCIe x32 connection

What makes you say that? The chart says x16.



> It's not really that either because PCIe 2.0 was "5GT/s" despite being only 4 gigabits per second.

Sort of, depends on where you're measuring. PCIe 2.0 runs at 5GT/s, which is the speed that the Phy layer runs at, but it uses an 8b/10b encoding, so the Data Link layer sees that 4GB/s. For Gen 3.0 and 4.0 (and I think 5.0) the Phy layer uses a 128b/130b encoding, which has much less overhead. So technically it's about 63Gb/s but we round up. But that's kind of a useless measurement because there's additional overhead from Acks/Nacks on the Data Link Layer and TLP headers on the transaction layer (which depends on the size of your TLPs, and whether or not you're using infinite credits.)

edit: I'm not sure which encoding the Phy layer on PCIe Gen 6.0 uses, since it's PAM4. The (approximately) 63 GB/s on the data link layer assumes 128b/130b encoding

> What makes you say that? The chart says x16.

Maybe that metric includes both directions. Either way, it's misleading, as you only get 128 MB/s (before protocol overhead) on PCIe 6.0 x16. (64Gb * 16 lanes) / 8 bits per byte = 128 MB/s




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