PCIe 7.0 already has a “draft” in the approval phase; final version should arrive in 2025

PCI-SIG, the group of companies responsible for PCIe standardization, released a “draft” for the approval of PCIe 7.0 to its members. The latest generation of the most popular peripheral interface on PCs is still in version 0.7, but its final format should arrive later this year.

According to the group’s announcement, version 0.7 of PCIe 7.0 incorporates the changes requested by participating companies when they evaluated the latest version of the interface, 0.5, released in April 2024. As a group, it remains confident in a launch of the new generation finalized later this year , there shouldn’t be many changes necessary.

Taking advantage of the announcement of another step on the path to PCIe 7.0, PCI-SIG recalls the objectives with the new interface:

• Double the bandwidth of PCIe 6.0, going from 64GT/s to 128GT/s, with up to 512GB/s in both directions via x16
• Use PAM4 signals – 4-level Pulse Amplitude Modulation
• Focus on channel parameters and reach
• Improve energy efficiency
• Maintain backward compatibility with all previous PCIe generations

The objectives also mention “maintaining low latency and high reliability”, which indicates that in this part PCIe 7.0 should not bring major changes.

We shouldn’t use PCIe 7.0 anytime soon

While PCI-SIG talks about PCIe 7.0, we are still in the popularization phase of PCIe 5.0, completed in 2019 – that is, it will complete six years in 2025.

PCIe 6.0, in turn, was finalized in January 2022, and this generation of the interface is also barely heard of.

There is a long way to go from finalizing a PCIe standard to implementing it in publicly available products. It should be no different with the PCIe 7.0 interface

Meanwhile, the latest PCIe finalized version available to PCI-SIG members is PCIe 6.3. Among the group’s members, we have representatives from all hardware giants, such as Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, Dell, Qualcomm, etc.

Font: PCI-SIG