PCI Expresss (aka PCIe) version 5.0 was first demoed in 2017, but is only now coming to prominence. AMD’s next AM5 socket will support PCIe 5.0, as will Intel’s new LGA1700. A few motherboards and CPUs with PCIe 5.0 are already on the market (e.g. Intel’s Adler Lake desktop CPUs), but not many.
Today the PCI-SIG unveiled PCI Express 7.0, the final specification for which is expected to be released in 2025, while the first PCIe 7.0 devices should hit the market in 2027 or thereabouts. This will be preceded by PCIe 6.0, of course, which we should see start to appear in server parts next year.
The near future will bring hardware capable of impressive bandwidth. Each generation of PCIe doubles the speed of the previous one. This means v6.0 is twice as fast as the PCIe 5.0 parts that you may soon have at home, v7.0 will be four times faster than v5.0.
To put that into more concrete terms, PCIe 7.0 will transfer 32GB/s on a single bi-directional connection. That is as fast as a full 16x PCIe 3.0 connection, which was standard on beefy GPUs until recently. The maximum bandwidth is 512GB/s for a 16x connection.
PCIe 7.0 will use PAM4 signaling, which was introduced with version 6.0. The new generation will focus on improving power efficiency, keeping latency low and maintaining backwards compatibility with previous standards.
