PCI Express 7.0 Specification Gets 128GT/s Data Rate, Ready in 2025

The PCI-SIG, the organization that oversees the PCI standard, has set the data rate of the upcoming PCIe 7.0 standard at 128GT/s. That’s a doubling of PCIe 6.0 and a quadrupling of PCIe 5.0.

It is expected that the PCI Express 7.0 standard be released in 2025, the PCI-SIG reports. The organization is now working on the development of that standard and has set the goal that it should achieve a data rate of 128GT/s. That enables a bi-directional bandwidth of 512GB/s in an x16 configuration. Like PCIe 6.0, the successor uses PAM4. That’s a form of pulse-amplitude modulation†

The PCIe 7.0 specification will be useful in emerging technologies such as 800G Ethernet, AI and machine learning applications, cloud and quantum computing, according to the PCI-SIG. The technology is not only suitable for such applications, but will probably be used there first and come to consumer hardware later.

Currently, PCIe 5.0 is sparsely used in consumer hardware. That will change later this year with the arrival of AMD’s AM5 platform, PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs and perhaps video cards. PCIe 5.0 is already more widely used in data centers and servers.

At the beginning of this year, the PCIe 6.0 standard announced in 2019 was finalized. The PCI-SIG expects it to be operational from next year in commercial environments such as the server and data center market. Nothing is known yet about consumer products based on PCIe 6.0.

The PCI-SIG has set the goal of releasing a new version of the PCI Express standard with double the bandwidth every three years. The organization is therefore on schedule.