Intel and Samsung’s new demo shows how blisteringly fast a PCIe 5.0 SSD setup will be

PCIe 5.0 SSDs have already started to get announced ahead of CES 2022, with Samsung and Adata teasing early hardware that supports the new standard. But it’s not just theoretical: Intel has released a new demo video showing off Samsung’s new PM1743 PCIe NVMe SSD in action (together with Intel’s Core i9-12900K CPU, of course) to hit data speeds over 13GB/s in the real world.

To put that in perspective, the PlayStation 5 touts a PCIe Gen 4 SSD as one of its main selling points, with Sony arguing that the ultra-fast speeds on its solid-state drive enable the near-instant load times on its consoles. That drive tops out at about 5.5GB/s, or more than half of the speeds that the Intel / Samsung system can manage.

Of course, that kind of data transfer rate isn’t exactly the most feasible set up right now, given that it requires a rig with Intel’s latest, most powerful processor and an enterprise-grade SSD that isn’t even out yet (and, presumably, will come with a pretty hefty price tag whenever consumer-grade versions do hit shelves sometime in the future).

Still, the demo is an impressive one that shows off the potential of what next-generation storage setups could offer once PCIe 5.0 drives do become the norm down the line.