If you read the headline and thought “wait, what about PCIe 6?” then you must have missed when the spec was finalized back in January… of 2022. That’s only three years ago, though, and it is true that PCI-SIG has been accelerating the pace of interconnect development. But why?
The simple answer is “AI”. Neural network processing is a different sort of computing challenge from typical client or server use, and the bottleneck in most cases has become the interconnect. Well, strictly speaking, the bottleneck is memory capacity and aggregate bandwidth, but faster interconnects help overcome this limitation by teaming multiple processors together.
PCIe 7.0 is going to once again double the bandwidth of PCI Express over PCIe 6.0; this brings per-lane bandwidth up to a whopping 128 Gigabits per second, or approximately 16 gigabytes per second across a single lane of PCIe. For comparison, PCIe 5.0, widely available on current-generation PCs, offers “just” 4 GB/second on a single lane. These kinds of transfer rates are largely unnecessary on consumer PCs, but as we discussed, that’s not the market that PCI-SIG is catering to with these upgrades.
This is actually the second call for feedback. PCI-SIG released version 0.5 of the PCI Express 7.0 specification back in April 2024. The new version 0.7 spec incorporates feedback that the group received from members on that release. No word on exactly what that feedback was, since we’re not members and not privy to that information, but the industry group is still targeting 2025 for the final release.