What simply occurred? We’ve solely simply began to see firms reveal their blisteringly quick PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs for shoppers, however the PCI Special Interesting Group (PCI-SIG) is at all times seeking to the following technology. Now, it has introduced what we will anticipate in 2025: PCIe 7.0.
At the PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2022, going down in California, the longer term model of the PCIe specification was introduced. This comes after the consortium launched the ultimate PCIe 6.0 specification in January.
As with earlier generations, PCIe 7.0 doubles the bandwidth of its predecessor, from 64 GT/s to 128 GT/s, equal to as much as 512GB/s of bi-directional throughput (earlier than making an allowance for encoding overhead and header effectivity) through the x16 connection. Looking at it one other method, PCIe 7.0 has 4 instances the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0.
The new specification will use 1b/1b flit mode encoding and is predicated on Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 ranges (PAM4) that was launched with PCIe 6.0. The fee writes that it’s centered on bettering energy effectivity whereas delivering low latency and excessive reliability. As regular, PCIe 7.0 will probably be appropriate with all earlier generations of PCIe know-how.
It’s envisioned that PCIe 7.0 will probably be utilized for purposes comparable to 800 G Ethernet, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and cloud and quantum computing. It can even be useful in data-intensive areas, together with hyperscale information facilities, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and the army/aerospace.
It will probably be a very long time earlier than PCIe 7.0 gadgets begin arriving. The specification is ready to land in 2025, with the {hardware} not getting right here till 2028—and there is nonetheless PCIe 6.0 to return.
There is the upcoming shopper PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs, too, promising speeds of virtually 14 GB/s. They’re set to reach later this yr when AMD’s PCIe 5.0-supporting (Intel’s Alder Lake additionally helps the usual) Zen 4 platform lands, rumored to be someday in September.
