Not surprisingly, things are also moving fast on the PCI-SIG side, the consortium behind the PCI Express standard. To put it simply, they set the interface specifications. Broadly speaking, the objective is to double bandwidth every three years, and things are generally on track. Today, it’s the announcement of the PCIe 7.0 specifications!
PCI-SIG launches PCIe 7.0 specifications!
Of course, the consortium has only launched the specs for the new standard… Before it is adopted in the industrial sector, we’ll have to wait a little, although the press release indicates that data centers are ready to deploy networks built on this standard. As for the PC world, we’ll clearly have to be patient. At present, the dominant standard is PCIe 5.0, and we’re only just beginning to glimpse the possibilities of standard 6.0, via the storage sector in particular. But we need to move on and ensure that standards are ready when the need arises, so here’s what PCIe 7.0 promises :
- Bandwidth of up to 128 GT/s and up to 512 GB/s bidirectional in x16
- Use of PAM4 encoding signals
- Improved energy efficiency
- Maintains backward compatibility with older standards
So this standard is designed to be backward-compatible with older standards, while doubling the data rates offered by the 6.0 standard. Thus, a connector wired in x16 will be capable of delivering up to 512 GB/s bidirectionally, compared with 32 GB/s for an x1 connector. Bearing in mind that most current SSDs use an x4 interface via an M.2 connector, this then allows a total bandwidth of 128 GB/s. In short, before landing in our PCs, this is a standard that will primarily serve the pro sectors, notably those of AI, HPC (High Performance Computing) or hyperscale data centers. The big question now is when this standard will start to be deployed in industry.
