PCIe 7.0 to bring insane speeds of 128GT/s for even faster SSDs, 800 Gig ethernet, and more

Today, Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group or PCI-SIG, the consortium which publishes and maintains PCIe standards announced the latest generation of PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) with PCIe 7.0 or PCIe Gen7. The announcement was part of its PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2022 where the organization is celebrating its 30th year.

As has been the tradition, with the latest generation of PCIe too, the bandwidth of has doubled netting a total throughput of 128GT/s or 128Gbps uni-directionally on one lane (x1). Summing up, on PCIe x16 slot, like those for discrete graphics cards, the total theoretical throughput is 512GB/s bi-directionally. Meanwhile, an NVMe SSD, which typically pair with x4 PCIe slots, can provide up to 64GB/s uni-directionally. The final specifications will be released in 2025.

Here are the highlights of the new PCIe 7.0 standard:

• 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
• Continuing to deliver the low-latency and high-reliability targets
• Improving power efficiency
• Maintaining backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology

With the new PCIe Gen7, PCI-SIG says that the 800 Gig Ethernet (800 GbE), and other similar data intensive markets can be addressed far more effectively. You can find more details on the official press release here.

PCIe 7.0 to bring insane speeds of 128GT/s for even faster SSDs, 800 Gig ethernet, and more