Imagine, for a moment, that you had a brand-new M.2 SSD rated for sequential transfers of over 15 GB/second. Obviously, it’s the latest design, using four lanes of PCI Express 5.0 to achieve this immense throughput. Alternatively, it could be an x1 design—using PCIe 7.0. That’s right kids: PCIe 7.0 offers per-pin transfer rates of 128 GT/s, meaning that an x16 configuration offers 256 GB/second of bandwidth one way.
If you’re thinking that we just reported on a PCIe 7.0 draft, then you’re stuck in January, when we reported that the PCIe 7.0 spec had hit the 0.7 revision and was open for comment from PCI-SIG members. Well, now, PCI-SIG says that the draft spec is finalized, and that it doesn’t expect any more changes to the standard ahead of launch. “Unless any PCI-SIG members want to make any changes, PCIe 7.0 is […] ready to launch.”
If you’re a consumer PC enthusiast or PC gamer, you are probably thinking “who cares?” as you might not even have PCIe 5.0 in your rig yet. Indeed, PCIe 5.0 is just starting to appear on graphics cards like NVIDIA’s RTX 50 series and the Radeon RX 9070 series, though it’s been available on SSDs for a while now. However, datacenter operators and hyperscalers are chomping at the bit for this technology because interconnect bandwidth is one of the tightest and most challenging bottlenecks in the design of what NVIDIA calls “AI factories.”
Like previous iterations on the PCI Express technology, PCIe 7.0 will carry on with both backward and forward compatibility, and it will improve power efficiency over PCIe 6.0. Power consumption will still go up, of course, but it will go up less than the data rate, which doubles, as usual. PCIe 7.0 is indeed much more of an iteration than anything else; the biggest change from PCIe 6.0, which brought PAM4 signaling, is simply an increase in the transfer rate.
PCI-SIG says that it is targeting “data-intensive market segments such as Hyperscale Data Centers, High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Military/Aerospace; and emerging applications like AI/ML, 800G Ethernet and Cloud Computing.” Given that PCIe 6.0 hasn’t even found its way to PCs yet, it’ll probably be a few years before us mere mortals get to enjoy 128 GT/s data rates.