One of the capabilities of the new Intel CPUs is their support for PCI Express 5.0, however, there are no compatible graphics cards yet, so what better way than using an i9-12900K with a compatible PCI Gen5 SSD to check the speed transfer from the solid state drive. How does it perform?
It is not news or revelation that soon we will have NVMe SSDs compatible with PCIe Gen 5, which will mean doubling the speed at which this data is transmitted from the storage unit to the RAM and will allow for the first time to reach double-digit transfer measured in GB / s. Well, Intel has tested one of these units in its Intel Core 12 CPUs with Alder Lake-S architecture, taking advantage of the driver for this interface that these processors have incorporated.
They test an i9-12900K with a PCI Gen5 SSD
The Intel Core 12 have 16 fifth-generation PCI Express lines, designed for the graphics card, however this can be divided into 2 of 8 lines under the same interface. The problem? The remaining 4 lines that are intended to connect an NVMe SSD do so for the fourth version of the standard. However, this has not been a problem for Ryan Shrout to have decided to show the capabilities of this interface.
Using a Samsung PM1743 SSD, which has PCI Express 5.0 compatibility, Ryan has decided to combine it with a Core i9-12900K and has obtained neither more nor less than a transfer speed of 14 GB / s. This is twice the bandwidth of today’s fastest NVMe SSDs for PCs.
For this, Ryan has made use of an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 APEX motherboard, which has 16 and 8-line PCIe Gen 5 slots. This has forced him to have to use an adapter like the one you see in the image above to marry the PCI Gen5 SSD with the i9-12900K in order to use these interfaces directly.
Two are always better than one
Since the adapter interface is 8 lines and the new Intel CPUs support up to two simultaneous interfaces, Ryan Shrout only needed to connect two PCI Gen5 SSDs to i9-12900K using two adapters, achieving a bandwidth of 28 GB / s for both storage units together. A figure never seen before and that allow access to data in a memory beyond RAM at a transfer speed that a few years ago we considered worthy of the best memory for our PCs.
However, this demonstration only measures the copy speed and nothing else, if, for example, the data were compressed when it was copied from the SSD to the RAM, we have to take into account that the Intel Core 12 lack accelerators for the decompression of data when flight, so the computational load on the CPU in those cases would make us have to dedicate several cores even of the powerful Intel Core 12 for this task.
To finish, this reminds us of a weak point of the Intel Core 12, the fact that the 4 lines that are designed for NVMe SSD provided by the CPU are fourth and not fifth generation, which forces us to use the lines designed for the graphics card. Will Intel change this with Raptor Lake or Meteor Lake?