Earlier PCIe standards tended to last much longer than the latest ones, partly because of the increasing need for more bandwidth. Since the release of PCIe 4.0, PCI-SIG has been updating the standard every two and a half years (average), with PCIe 7.0 being the latest to be announced.

Continuing its trajectory, PCI-SIG has officially released the PCI Express 7.0 specification, marking yet another doubling of available bandwidth. This new standard propels PCIe to an impressive 128 GT/s, translating to a staggering 512 GB/s in each direction over a full x16 link. This monumental increase in data transfer capability is designed to cater to the demands of workloads in AI, machine learning, cloud computing, and quantum computing.

PCIe 7.0 integrates advanced technologies to achieve its speeds, including PAM4 signalling and Flit-based encoding. Furthermore, the specification emphasises increased power efficiency and maintains full backwards compatibility with all preceding PCIe versions.

While it will undoubtedly be several years before PCIe 7.0 makes its way into consumer products, PCI-SIG has already confirmed that development on the even faster PCIe 8.0 specification is actively underway to meet anticipated future industry needs. PCIe specifications typically find their initial implementation in AI accelerators, networking equipment, and high-performance storage devices, and we expect the same will happen for the first PCIe 7.0 devices.

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KitGuru says: Seeing PCIe 6.0 devices aimed at consumers are still scarce, when will consumers get their hands on the first PCIe 7.0 devices?

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