PCI Express 7.0 official specifications released

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PCI Express 7.0 specs released, setting a new bandwidth record

Work on PCIe 8.0 already underway. 



After more than two decades of continuous evolution (PCIe 1.0 came out in 2003), PCI-SIG has released the PCI Express 7.0 specification. Once again, the new standard doubles the available bandwidth, pushing PCIe to 128 GT/s and up to 512 GB/s in both directions on a full x16 link. It is designed to support the next generation of AI, machine learning, cloud, and quantum computing workloads.

To put this in perspective, the industry relied on PCIe 3.0 for nearly a decade. Introduced in 2010, PCIe 3.0 remained the dominant standard across several CPU and GPU generations. PCIe 4.0 arrived in 2017 but was only widely adopted across two GPU generations: AMD’s Radeon RX 5000/6000 series and NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series. PCIe 5.0 has only recently reached mainstream graphics architectures, starting with NVIDIA’s RTX 50 series and AMD’s Radeon RX 90 series, along with Intel’s latest CPUs (for some reason only professional variants). 

PCIe 7.0 Key Features

• Delivers 128 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally on x16
  
• Uses PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) signaling and Flit-based encoding
  
• Improved power efficiency
  
• Full backward compatibility with previous PCIe generations
  

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