PCI-SIG with PCI Express 7.0 draft specs
PCI-SIG, the organization is currently hosting an event in Santa Clara for developers. The Special Interest Group has settled on the PCIe Gen7 draft specs (version 0.3). The new standard is on its path to double the bandwidth over Gen6.
The finalization of the PCIe Gen6 specifications in the previous year provided an incentive for setting the objectives for the successor. The next-gen PCI Express standard is now on a path to double the bandwidth over successor. Should this goal be achieved, the Gen7 specs would offer four times the bandwidth of Gen5 and eight times of currently the most popular standard (Gen4).
According to the slides, PCIe Gen7 uses PAM4 signaling, just like the Gen6 standard. The maximum Data Rate will increase from 64 GT/s to 128 GT/s, and it will rely on 1b/1b Flit mode encoding. The goals for the Gen7 standard will now focus on improving efficiency and ensuring backwards compatibility with previous generation of PCIe technology.
PCI Gen7 Specifications Status, Source: PCI-SIG
However, neither of this information is new, all this information was already published last year. The details covered by the Version 0.3 specifications are not public; hence it is not clear what are the underlying details that enable such a data rate increase over the previous standard. What is important is that the Group has settled on the initial draft and the core technological underpinnings have been decided, notes AnandTech.
PCI Gen7 Specifications Status, Source: PCI-SIG
The PCIe Gen7 specs are far from final, but PCI-SIG puts an effort to have the finalized and ready for release by 2025. This likely does not mean we will see consumer graphics cards featuring this standard already in 2 years, on a contrary, the deployment of Gen5 specs has shown that graphics requirement for PCI bandwidth is not as important as it is for storage and data-center accelerators. Nevertheless, the next-Gen PCIe standard will again push the boundaries for PC and high-level computing.
Source: PCI-SIG via AnandTech
