The industrial organization PCI-SIG has announced a new development version of PCI Express 7.0, the next version of the main bus with which current personal computers work.
“As we head into the year 2025, I am pleased to announce that version 0.7 of the PCIe 7.0 specification is now available for members to review.” This version of the specification incorporates all the feedback we received on the previous development version, brings us one step closer to the full launch of the PCIe 7.0 specification, scheduled for 2025«commented Al Yanes, president and director of PCI-SIG.
What’s new in PCI Express 7.0
PCI Express is a fundamental standard in modern computers and almost unique once the old ISA, AGP, the original PCI or an increasingly less used SATA are left behind. And this local Input/Output bus is used for everything in a PC, the internal connections of the integrated circuits of the motherboards (chipsets), communication with the CPU and also to install components as important as graphics cards, SSDs or dedicated networking or sound solutions.
Organizations like PCI-SIG are always far ahead of the industry, as Any revision of these standards takes a long time. until they reach the end customer. In fact, PCIe 6.0 has not yet been released and the next version is quite advanced in terms of its technical standards. Although the commercial launch will still take a few years to appear, PCI Express 7.0 is preparing very well for the future, based on the new features that are announced.
The main novelty of this version is that it will work on optical connections and therefore it will be the greatest advance since the creation of the standard. Gen7 will support a wide range of optical technologies in the future to continue improving the capabilities of the standard in performance, power consumption, latency and range.
Perhaps the most notable will be the bandwidth in a lane (x1) of 128 GT/s, which means that with a x16 slot on a motherboard, such as the one used by dedicated graphics cards, the theoretical bidirectional performance can be raised to about stratospheric 512 GB/s. This leaves us, as a practical example, that an SSD can offer truly incredible data transfer speeds of 60 Gbytes per second. In addition to improving the interface, advances in controllers and NAND flash memories will be needed.
It is just an example of its enormous potential, although it must be said that the standard will be released first in professional technologies such as Quantum computing, cloud and hyperscale data centersto then reach high-performance computing at the client level. At the consumer level it will take a few years, taking into account that the most used standard currently is PCIe Gen4. Current Gen5 SSDs only take up a small portion of total solid state drives sold, and Gen5 graphics cards have not yet hit the market.
