PCIe 7.0 to quadruple the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0, coming in 2025
The PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2022(opens in new tab) is underway in California. The PCI-SIG group is responsible for development of PCIe specifications, and today it announced that the next (realistically next-next) generation PCIe 7.0 specification is set to be released in 2025.
PCIe doubles in data rate and bandwidth every generation. This means PCIe 7.0 can deliver a maximum data rate up to 128GT/s. If we ignore overhead, PCIe 7.0 delivers up to 512GB/s of bi-directional throughput for a x16 connection. This compares to 32GB/s for a PCIe 3.0 x16 connection, 64GB/s for PCIe 4.0 and 128GB/s for PCIe 5.0. It's important to emphasise that these are bi-directional numbers.
The PCI-SIG developers are targeting PCIe 7.0 at the usual bandwidth craving suspects including AI, machine learning, data centres, HPC and quantum computing. How does 800G ethernet sound! But what does PCIe 7.0 mean for gamers?
Current generation 16x graphics cards don’t suffer much – if at all, when compared on PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 systems, but with faster GPUs, developing technologies and things like DirectStorage(opens in new tab), there will be a need for higher bandwidth in the future. It's also a given that we’ll see more graphics cards make use of x4 or x8 connections. A PCIe 7.0 x2 slot offers as much bandwidth as a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot!
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Faster PCIe connections are much more useful when it comes to NVMe SSDs. Already we’re seeing pre-production PCIe 5.0 drives close in on
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