Twenty-two years after the first version was validated, PCI Express has set the seventh in motion.
While the older among you may remember the AGP standard for the most powerful graphics cards, PCI Express has pushed this standard into retirement to become the sole standard for expansion cards in our PCs, greatly simplifying things. The first version of PCI Express was finalized in 2003 and, since then, every three or four years, a new iteration is validated by the PCI-SIG(Special Interest Group), the consortium representing over eight hundred companies and responsible for validating the technical characteristics of the multiple iterations of the standard.
The main technical features of PCIe 7.0 © PCI-SIG
In 2019, version 5.0 was validated by the PCI-SIG. In 2022, we discovered the technical specifications of PCIe 6.0 and, again three years later, those of PCIe 7.0 have arrived, underlining a slight acceleration in the PCI-SIG timetable at a time when artificial intelligence requires ever higher data rates for transmissions within our PCs. In fact, we once again discover a doubling of data rates compared to PCIe 6.0, which itself doubled things up compared to PCIe 5.0. In fact, between 2019 and 2022, we went from 32 GT/s to 64 GT/s per PCI Express line, and today we're going from 64 GT/s to 128 GT/s, again per PCI Express line.
If we keep to the principle of doubling per PCI Express line, the gain becomes absolutely colossal in absolute terms: we can thus count on a maximum throughput of 512 GB/s when using 16 PCI Express 7.0 lines in bi-directional mode. Alongside these gains, we can also count on the use of the PAM4 signal(Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) as on PCIe 6.0, while PCI-SIG also evokes greater energy efficiency. We should bear in mind, however, that validation of the new standard does not mean that the first products based on this standard will be arriving any time soon: it's quite possible that we'll have to wait several more years. After all, PCIe 5.0 graphics cards and SSDs are only just starting to become commonplace!
