Friday, January 17th 2025
PCI-SIG Releases PCI-Express Gen 7 Draft Specification 0.7—128 Gbps per Lane
PCI-SIG, the consortium that governs the PCI Express I/O interconnect, released draft specification version 0.7 for the upcoming PCI-Express 7.0 standard (or PCIe Gen 7). An early-2025 release of this draft could indicate that PCIe Gen 7 gets finalized into specification version 1.0 by the end of 2025, from where implementers can pick it up to design their devices around. We are now at 32 Gbps per lane per direction with PCIe Gen 5, and PCIe Gen 6 doubles it to 64 Gbps, which would mean PCIe Gen 7 will double that further to 128 Gbps per lane per direction. PCI-Express 7.0 x1 would offer the same bandwidth as PCI-Express 3.0 x16. We could realistically expect the first computing platforms implementing PCIe Gen 7 to come out around 2027 or even 2028. PCIe forms the physical layer for a number of derivative standards, such as CXL, Thunderbolt, USB (USB 3.0 onwards), NVMe, SDexpress, CFexpress, and DMI.Many Thanks to Tumble George for the tip
Source:
Tom's Hardware
16 Comments on PCI-SIG Releases PCI-Express Gen 7 Draft Specification 0.7—128 Gbps per Lane
PCIe 2.0 5.0 GT/s
PCIe 3.0 8.0 GT/s
PCIe 4.0 16 GT/s
PCIe 5.0 32 GT/s
PCIe 6.0 64 GT/s
.
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and now...
PCIe 7.0 128 GT/s...I did not see that coming. :)
What would we do without these standards organizations.
We can never get enuf bandwidth, specially now with AI, so why not push the limits of PCIe 7.0 to192 GT/s or even 256GT/s.
It takes several years to evolve just one step forward in a standard like PCIe, better go for the maximum performance each time.
Why double if you can triple or even quadruple each evolution of a standard, if it can be done they should do it.
These incremental upgrades of different standards set in a predefined pattern is a decease in many industries holding back progress and delaying human evolution by years or even decades.
Capitalism at it's best, hold back progress as much as possible to make as much money as long as possible with small and predictable upgrades, NVIDIA done it for years.
There is a reason NVIDIA accelerated it's development of new generations from every two years to every year.
Competition from ASIC is pressuring NVIDIA to expand with 1000 new engineers to push development to the maximum immediately or they will become obsolete in the AI arena in the near future.
ASICs vs. GPUs: Is Nvidia's AI Dominance at Risk?
A summary table on Wikipedia is somewhat different:
PCIe Gen 2 and earlier use 8b/10b, so it means that 5 GT/s is actually 4 GT/s after you remove the encoding overhead.
but you should add Intel and almost every other tech company onto the list....as they ALL are or have been guilty of this at one time or another !
*(Exponential, by the way. Same as we’ve got for CPU speeds, just at a vastly higher rate from one generation to the next.**)
**(Homework task: Find out where we stand, cumulating those gains, with CPU and GPU vs. PCIe speed, also in terms of storage. I’d love to see that spread out.)
Maybe, with more capital investment, movement could have been sped up even more … … … May you please remind me what the general opinion on faster PCIe standards was, please? Did you note any … issue with them? IDK, in terms of—well, not color fidelity, of course—maybe, rather: Temperatures, power draw, design constraints!? Did it get harder to design PCIe risers, for one? What do we know about trace lengths? Is there an increase in capital expenditure for every unit of product sold using those higher rates?
Yeah. :kookoo: