PCI Express 7.0 specification will have data rate of 128GT/s and will be 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 double compared to PCIe 6.0 and quadruple compared to PCIe 5.0.

It is expected that the PCI Express 7.0 standard be released in 2025, reports the PCI-SIG. 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. This 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.

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

Currently, PCIe 5.0 is slowly being used in consumer hardware. That will change later this year with the arrival of AMD’s AM5 platform, consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs, and perhaps video cards as well. PCIe 5.0 is already being 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 deployed from next year in commercial environments such as the server and data center market. Nothing is yet known about consumer products based on PCIe 6.0.

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