Although we’ve only just started the PCI Express 5.0 (PCIe Gen 5) generation, the PCI Special Interest Group is already looking ahead. The group announced on Tuesday that the PCIe 7.0 specification is expected to be completed by 2025.
PCI Express is the basic I/O standard that governs two key components on the PC: the discrete GPUas well as the system’s SSD. Both components are constantly being improved and require ever faster bandwidth, which the PCI Express standard provides.
PCI Express 7.0 will continue the current trend, Doubling the bandwidth of PCI Express 6.0 from 64 gigatransfers (256 GB/s) per second to 128 gigatransfers per second (512 GB/s), bidirectional and over a x16 interface. PCIe 7.0 will also be backward compatible with previous generations of the technology, the SIG said.
Because of the way specifications are created, published, and then implemented in silicon, specification development often precedes the actual market presence of certified products by years. It was PCI Express 5.0, for example announced in May 2019, but was first introduced in finished products as part of Intel’s stream 12th generation “Alder Lake” processors At the end of last year. (It offers bi-directional speeds of 128 GB/s.)
PCI Express 5.0 is supported by AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processorsalso this fall. PCI Express 6.0 was supposed to be released in 2021, but the final specification was released in January – meaning we could see PCIe 6.0 products in 2023. If this trend continues, PCI Express 7.0 will be released in 2025 with the first PCIe 7.0 hardware most likely appearing in 2026 or 2027.
PCI SIG
From a market perspective, the new standard is expected to target enterprise applications including quantum computing, high performance computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning. One exception might be support for 800 Gigabit Ethernet, a technology that’s nowhere near mainstream.
Otherwise, PCIe 7.0 features are what you would expect: it will use PAM4 signaling, for example. The PCIe SIG has also set itself the goal of “improving energy efficiency” without saying what those goals might be. Laptop SSDs tend to heat up quite easily under load, so it will be interesting to see what progress the SIG can make there. Either way, it will be several years before consumers see the benefits.
