Intel’s efforts to develop a PCIe throttling driver point towards a very hot Gen 6 future

Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master M.2 heatsink


My biggest gripe with current PCs is excessive power consumption. Second to that is the heat generated by NVMe SSDs. A motherboard with an acre of metal covering half the board, or SSDs cooled by tower heatsinks with tiny fans is just not what I want to see. It’s not like Gen 5 x4 SSDs deliver tangible performance improvements anyway.

That’s why the news (via Tom’s Hardware) of Intel’s efforts to create a bandwidth controller driver to address these issues is concerning. This driver has been developed for Linux users with the aim of controlling thermal issues inherent to high bandwidth PCIe devices by reducing PCIe link speed when necessary.



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