Astera Labs’ PCIe 6.x SSD demo reaches 27 GB/s, highlighting massive storage performance gains for AI and HPC data center workloads.
At DesignCon 2025, Astera Labs demonstrated PCIe 6.x interoperability, highlighting the significant potential of next-generation storage connectivity. Showcasing its Scorpio Smart Fabric Switch technology, Astera Labs illustrated how the future of PCIe storage will evolve, tackling challenges like signal integrity at dramatically higher data rates.
Setting the Stage for PCIe 6.x Storage
PCIe 6.x represents a substantial leap forward from PCIe 5.0, effectively doubling available bandwidth per lane to 128 GT/s. In practical terms, this means that while Gen5 SSDs top out around 14,000MB/s, Gen6 SSDs will reach up to around 28,000MB/s. Improving NVMe SSD performance opens up practical opportunities for intensive workloads such as AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing.
Astera Labs’ demonstration focused specifically on proving real-world viability. Utilizing their Scorpio P-Series fabric switch, the demo achieved sequential read speeds of around 27 GB/s with development Micron Gen6 SSDs. One of the primary challenges as PCIe evolves to higher frequencies is maintaining stable data transmission over traditional cabling and connectors. Astera Labs’ portfolio of PCIe 6.x solutions, including Aries 6 Retimers, Aries Smart Cable Modules, and Scorpio P-Series Fabric Switches were expressly developed to enable seamless connectivity at higher transfer rates.
In this demonstration, Astera Labs highlighted the compatibility and performance benefits of combining PCIe 6.x storage with NVIDIA’s GPUDirect Storage (GDS). It’s important to note that NVIDIA’s H100 GPU utilizes PCIe Gen 5 x16 connectivity, which provides a theoretical maximum bandwidth of approximately 64 GB/s. A single PCIe Gen 6 SSD operating at x4 lanes can deliver bandwidth roughly equivalent to a PCIe Gen 5 x8 connection, around 28 GB/s. In Astera Labs’ demonstration, each Gen 6 SSD achieved approximately 27 GB/s, effectively saturating the equivalent of a Gen 5 x8 link per drive.
25.2 GiB/s or roughly 27GB/s
Getting storage to the GPU as efficiently as possible is a significant undertaking that the industry is working to solve in various ways. We recently ran a demo for WD, highlighting the impact on AI visualization workloads. This isn’t just a problem on a large scale, though; our latest workstation SSD reviews also consider the impact storage has on GPU performance for AI developers.
Why Enterprises Should Pay Attention
PCIe 6.x may still be on the horizon, but early demonstrations like Astera Labs showcase its profound implications for enterprise storage infrastructure. As AI workloads grow more complex, faster (and larger) storage that can feed data directly to GPUs becomes indispensable. Enterprises planning for long-term infrastructure growth should keep PCIe 6.x on their radar, given its dramatic impact on performance and efficiency, even though Gen5 storage is only now becoming mainstream.
For additional details, visit the official announcement from Astera Labs here.
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