PCIe 6.0 isn’t even here yet, but already the tech industry is starting to draft the specifications for PCIe 7.0 — and you can expect some crazy fast speeds.
On Tuesday, the standards group PCI-SIG published the first review draft for PCIe 7.0, which is being designed to double the bandwidth for PCIe 6.0, while offering four times the bandwidth in PCIe 5.0, the latest standard available in the market.
Specifically, PCIe 7.0 can transfer up to 256 GB/seconds in each direction over a 16-lane configuration for a bidirectional bandwidth at up to 512GB/s.
Since PCIe is used as the standard interface for graphics cards, storage drives, and motherboards, the new spec could drive blazingly fast speeds for various PC components. (For example, the latest PCIe Gen 5 SSD drives can hit 12,400MBps or higher, far more than the 7000MBps top speeds of PCIe Gen 4 SSDs.)
That said, PCI-SIG didn’t release many technical details about the PCIe 7.0 technology. In addition, the finalized spec won’t arrive until 2025, so things could change. But the PCI-SIG group’s overall goal is to double the bandwidth every three years.
The bandwidth may seem like overkill. However, the standards group envisions PCIe 7.0 powering emerging applications including “800G ethernet,” along with quantum computing and supercomputers. So you can expect the first adopters to be enterprise systems, such as data centers, before the technology rolls out to consumers.
PCI-SIG plans on launching a compliance program for PCIe 7.0 in 2027 to formally label applicable components as certified under the new standard. As a result, consumers can expect the first PCie 7.0 components to arrive around then.
As for PCIe 6.0, the finalized spec was issued in January 2022. A compliance program is slated to arrive in March 2024. PCie 6.0 also remains backward-compatible with all previous generations.
