PCIe Gen5
5th-generation PCIe bus. 32 GT/s per lane — double Gen4. Consumer platforms since Intel Alder Lake / AMD Ryzen 7000 (2022). An x4 Gen5 NVMe SSD reaches 14 GB/s sequential.
Thermal challenges: Gen5 NVMe runs hot (~80 °C without cooling) — requires heatsinks as standard. Early Gen5 SSDs had marginal real performance gains for consumers vs Gen4 (few workloads saturate 7 GB/s). The GPU market has gone to Gen5 too (RTX 50 series, RX 9070) but no games saturate Gen4 yet. Gen6 (64 GT/s) was spec'd in 2022, first hardware ~2024-2025 in servers. Backwards-compatible — a Gen5 device in a Gen4 slot runs at Gen4.