PCI Express 7.0 was first unveiled in 2022, but it was a work in progress. Version 0.3 of the spec was released in mid-2023 and now the PCI-SIG is up to version 0.5 – the full release is expected in 2025.
Which is fine, the consumer market is still seeing growing adoption of PCIe 5.0 and there is PCIe 6.0 to focus on after that. Each new version doubles the bandwidth of the previous one.
PCIe 7.0 targets 128 gigatransfers per second. Depending on the configuration, that could mean 512GB/s with an x16 link or 32GB/s with an x1 link. Check out the chart below – basically, with each new generation you can halve the number of lanes to get the same speed or get double the speed at the same number of lanes.
Even the mighty Nvidia RTX 4090 uses a PCIe 4.0 slot, the same goes for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. As we said, 5.0 adoption is still underway and we may see it with the next-gen cards. Per the chart, a PCIe 4.0 x16 link only manages 64GB/s transfer speeds, PCIe 7.0 would be able to do it with just 2 lanes.
Of course, it will be quite a while before we see PCIe 7.0 hardware in consumer products. This will appear in servers first for applications that need to move massive amounts of data. The PCI-SIG expects the new standard to be used in 800G Ethernet, AI/Machine learning devices, cloud servers and even quantum computers.
The goals of PCI Express 7.0 are:
- 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 low-latency and high-reliability targets
- Improving power efficiency
- Maintaining backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology
