The release of the PCIe Gen6 standard has not yet taken place and we can say that the PCIe Gen5 version still has a relatively small adoption rate (its use is even less), but the PCI-SIG group is not finished and has already presented a definitive draft with specifications the new PCIe Gen7 standard.

PCIe Gen7 standard as expected doubles the bandwidth of the previous generation, which means that there is a huge increase per lane and that it will improve the performance of various components using fewer PCIe lanes. It’s not hard to understand, we already experienced it back then with the debut of the PCIe Gen4 standard, which with only 8 PCIe lanes was able to offer the same bandwidth as the PCIe Gen3 standard with 16 lanes.

In the attached image we can see that the standard PCIe Gen7 uses PAM4 signaling, the same as the PCIe Gen6 version. The maximum data transfer rate ranges from 64 GT/s to 128 GT/s and it also retains the 1b/1b (Flit Mode) coding, present since the PCIe Gen6 standard.

I make a quick comparison to better understand what this new standard can give on its own, I remind you that with PCIe Gen4 we have a bandwidth of almost 2 GB/s per linewith PCIe Gen5 it goes up to almost 4 GB/s, with PCIe Gen6 it is 7.87 GB/s and PCIe Gen7 is the bandwidth 15.74 GB/s

Since these are per-lane values, with a PCIe Gen7 x16 configuration (16 lanes) we should total bandwidth 251.84 GB/s. The leap over the PCIe Gen6 standard is, as we said, double the bandwidth. In M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs, which normally work with 4 PCIe lanes, we would have bandwidth almost 63 GB/s. Keep in mind that we are talking about bandwidth in each direction and that overall PCIe Gen7 standard will reach, rounded up, 512 GB/s.

The most important thing about this news is not only the technical data that we have just seen, but the fact that the PCI-SIG group has agreed on the specifications of the PCIe Gen7 standard, and that we already have the final design of your key at a technical level. If all goes according to plan, the PCIe Gen6 standard will start arriving in 2024 and the PCIe Gen7 standard it will land sometime in 2027. We still have a few years ahead of us