The PCI SIG, the industry consortium that governs the I/O interface, has published the first public draft of PCI-Express 7. Version 0.5 of the standard says it incorporates feedback from its partners and maintains a planned roadmap for availability in 2025.

You already know that PCI Express is the basic standard of modern computers. Local Input/Output bus, which is used for the internal connection of integrated circuits of motherboards (chipsets), communication with the CPU, and also for the installation of such important components as graphics cards, SSD or dedicated solutions, networks or sound.

The last version to hit the market was PCIe 5.0 and it is currently in the deployment phase. Another, PCIe 6.0, is under development. And that’s why you’ll wonder about PCI SIG’s urgency for the next version. The explanation lies in needs artificial intelligence technology, especially in network components. The enterprise market and large servers will certainly be the first to adopt the next version of the interface.

What PCI-Express 7 will offer

The big news in this version is that it will continue to work optical links and therefore it will be the biggest advance since the creation of the standard. Gen7 will support a wide range of optical technologies in the future to continue to improve the standard’s capabilities in terms of performance, power consumption, latency and range.

Perhaps most notable will be the bandwidth per lane (x1) of 128 GT/s, which means that with a x16 slot on the motherboard, such as that used by dedicated graphics cards, the theoretical two-way performance can be increased to approx. a stratospheric 512 GB/s. This leaves us as a practical example, that the SSD will be able to offer a truly incredible data transfer speed of 60 Gbytes per second. In addition to interface improvements, advances in controllers and NAND flash memories will be needed.

And as we said, the group will focus first on professional technologies such as quantum computing, cloud and hyperscale data centers, and then achieve high-performance computing at the client level. There is no rush at the level of consumption. Current Gen5 SSDs only account for a small fraction of total SSDs sold, and Gen5 graphics cards have yet to hit the market. And Gen6 should hit the market first.

However, the industry group responsible for the standard is preparing for the future and assures that PCI-Express 7 will be launched in 2025. For now, it will only reach the professional server and data center market.