PCI-SIG today announced that the PCI Express (PCIe ) 7.0 specification will double the data rate to 128 GT/s and is targeted for release to members in 2025. "For 30 years the guiding principle of PCI-SIG has been, 'If we build it, they will come,'" observed Nathan Brookwood, Research Fellow at Insight 64. "Early parallel versions of PCI technology accommodated speeds of hundreds of megabytes/second, well matched to the graphics, storage and networking demands of the 1990s.

In 2003, PCI-SIG evolved to a serial design that supported speeds of gigabytes/second to accommodate faster solid-state disks and 100MbE Ethernet. Almost like clockwork, PCI-SIG has doubled PCIe specification bandwidth every three years to meet the challenges of emerging applications and markets. Today's announcement of PCI-SIG's plan to double the channel's speed to 512 GB/s (bi-directionally) puts it on track to double PCIe specification performance for another 3-year cycle."