Even though PCIe 5.0 is on the market for 3 years, it’s still not present in lots of devices. PCIe 6 numbers are even worse as the standard is only available in big data centers. However, PCI-SIG doesn’t sleep and they’ve already finished the development of PCIe 7 standard.
PCI-SIG is a consortium of the industry developers of PCI, PCI-X and PCX Express specs. Since 2021 it’s a non-profit organization and It includes more than 800 members. The consortium announced the last draft (09) with the final specs of the newest PCIe 7 standard for the domestic market.
PCIe 7 specs according to Al Yanes
Al Yanes is the president of the director board of PCI-SIG and it stated that the last draft 0.9 indicates the most precise specs of the new PCIe 7 standard. There are no fundamental changes for 2025 and the complete list would arrive near the end of the year.
He also stated that PCIe 7 is thought for intensive data usage like data centers, high performance informatics spaces, AI/LM and cloud computing functions. The draft list probably will be very similar to the official list at the end of the year.
PCI express specs for the technology world
The new standard offers a 128 GT7s bit rate and 512 GT/s bidirectional through x16. It represents twice the power of PCIe 6.0 when it arrived on market 3 years ago. It also means that the consortium goals for the 3 years period has been reached. Each new PCIe version is two times faster than the previous generation. PCIe 4 is twice as fast as PCIe 3 and so on.
PCIe 7 focuses on reducing latency, improving energetic efficiency and offering retro compatibility with any previous generation. It makes use of pulse amplification modulation signaling in 4 levels (PAM 4). And even with the 0.9 draft, the main AI accelerators like NVIDIA and AMD won’t announce the compatible products list.
The new standard will probably be used to create SSD M.2 units with up to 50 GB/s sequential reading speed as well as network cards with faster connectivity. It’s great news for enterprises and domestic users alike.
The PCIe 7 launch is expected for 2025 end. However, there will be some years to wait before the domestic devices include PCIe 7 support.