PCI Express 7.0’s blazing speeds are nearly here, but PCIe 6 is still vapor

PCI Express 7 is nearing completion, the PCI Special Interest Group said Tuesday, and the final specification should be released later this year.

PCI Express 7, the backbone of the modern motherboard, is at the stage 0.9, which the PCI-SIG characterizes as the “final draft” of the specification. The technology was at version 0.5 a year ago, almost to the day, and originally authored in 2022.

The situation remains the same, however. While modern PC motherboards are stuck on PCI Express 5.0, the specification itself moves ahead. PCI Express has doubled the data rate about every three years, from 64 gigtransfers per second in PCI Express 6.0 to the upcoming 128 gigatransfers per second in PCIe 7. (Again, it’s worth noting that PCIe 6.0 exists solely on paper.) Put another way, PCIe 7 will deliver 512GB/s in both directions, across a x16 connection.

It’s worth noting that the PCI-SIG doesn’t see PCI Express 7 living inside the PC market, at least not initially. Instead, PCIe 7 is expected to be targeted at cloud computing, 800-gigabit Ethernet and, of course, artificial intelligence. It will be backwards-compatible with the previous iterations of PCI Express, the SIG said.

PCIe 7 has the following goals, which remain unchanged, according to the SIG:

• Delivering 128 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally via x16 configuration
• Utilizing PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) signaling
• Focusing on the channel parameters and reach
• Improving power efficiency
• Continuing to deliver the low-latency and high-reliability targets

When can we expect PCI Express 6?

PCI Express 7 might be far in the future. So when will PCI Express 6.0 debut in PCs?

PCI Express 6.0 was officially approved in January 2022. But we have yet to see support for the technology, as Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop chip, for example, still supports PCIe 5.0. It all puts the PCI SIG’s announcement in some perspective: PCIe’s new advances only matter when see them in the real world, and that process can take years.