The race to be the world’s next high-performance memory card standard took it up a notch this week when the SD Association said it will adopt PCIe 4.0 for SD Express cards.
Yes, you heard that right: PCIe 4.0 in a postage stamp-sized memory card, a move that will make SD cards essentially on a par with some of the fastest memory card standards out right now.
SD Express itself isn’t new, as the SD Association introduced it with version 7.0 of the spec using PCIe 3.1. With the new 8.0 spec, the SD Association moves to using up to two lanes of PCIe 4.0 for up to 4GBps of throughput.
SD AssociationAn SD Express card that can support two lanes of PCIe 4.0 will feature an additional third row of pins.