PCI Express 7.0 specs already published

p align=”justify”> PCI-SIG has officially approved the specifications for PCI Express 7.0, a new generation of high-speed bus designed to handle huge amounts of data. The new version is focused on modern and future tasks, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud environments, quantum computing, and 800G Ethernet-class network connections.

The key technical change was the traditional doubling of bandwidth. In PCIe 7.0, the transfer speed per lane has increased from 64 to 128 gigatransactions per second (GT/s). To achieve this level, the same PAM4 modulation technology, first used in PCIe 6.0, is used. In addition to increasing bandwidth, the standard provides higher power efficiency, reduced latency, and full backward compatibility with previous versions of PCI Express.

Despite the approval of the specifications, it will be more than a year before the first devices with PCIe 7.0 support appear. For comparison, the PCIe 6.0 standard was finalized in January 2022, but the first consumer devices with its support, such as SSDs, will not begin to appear until the end of 2025. PCIe 7.0 is expected to follow a similar adoption trajectory.