Blazing Fast PCI Express 7.0 Gets Updated to Version 0.5, Is Launching in 2025

PCI-Sig, the governing body for PCI Express, has announced that version 0.5 of the technology is now available for members to examine. This is a crucial step in the technology's adoption, as it gives members a roadmap to follow when designing next-generation hardware. PCI-Sig says this is the first official draft of this new interface, which it expects to release in 2025.

The company states its goals for PCI Express 7.0 are as follows:

• Delivering 128GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512GB/s bi-directionally via x16 configuration

• Utilizing PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with four levels) signaling

• Focusing on the channel parameters and reach

• Continuing to deliver low-latency and high-reliability targets

• Improving power efficiency

• Maintaining backward compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology

If you're thinking, "Wait, aren't we just now starting to use PCIe 5.0?" The answer is yes, we are, and we haven't even begun to talk about PCIe 6.0 for client devices, so this technology will be strictly aimed at enterprise-level applications upon its arrival. PCI-Sig says it's designed to be a scalable interconnect targeting AI, machine learning, aerospace, hyperscale data centers, HPC, quantum computing, and cloud computing.

PCI Sig aims to deliver a new version of PCI Express every three years. Credit: PCI Sig

As always with PCI Express, every version doubles the available bandwidth, so while PCIe 6.0 offers 256GB/s of bandwidth over an x16 connection, version 7 doubles that to 512GB/s. If you do the math for SSDs, version 5.0 offers up to 16GB/s across four lanes, which translates to about 14GB/s once overhead is deducted. Version 6.0 takes that to 32GB/s, so 7.0 will offer 64GB/s on an x4 interface, meaning we could have SSDs one day that offer around 50GB/s. For comparison, the PCIe 3.0 SSDs in the newest MacBook Pro laptops top out at around 3GB/s, while PCIe 4 SSDs usually hit around 7GB/s.

Before you get too excited about these numbers, remember that these specifications are prepped far in advance to prevent bottlenecks from arriving unexpectedly. As an example of this long-term planning, PCI-Sig first announced version 7.0 in 2022, even though PCIe 5.0 was barely starting to arrive in client devices at the time. We've yet to hear much about PCIe 6.0 in 2024, even though we wrote in 2019 that it would arrive in 2022. However, it is expected to arrive this year, but probably only for enterprise applications, with client products arriving much later, probably around 2026 or so.