While the consumer market is just getting a taste of the new PCIe 5.0 standard, the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has announced the specifications of PCIe 7.0/PCIe Gen7. The new specification doubles the transfer speeds of the 6th generation interface.
512 GB/s bandwidth with x16 connections
PCIe 7.0 will be able to deliver up to 128 Gbps uni-directional speed on just one lane. That means a 7th generation PCIe x16 interface will be able to transfer 4,096 Gbps or 512 GB/s data in its bi-directional state, which is a huge amount of bandwidth for PCIe x16 devices such as GPUs. NVMe SSDs on the other hand generally utilize up to 4 lanes of PCIe, meaning that they will be able to deliver up to 64 GB/s transfer speed in a uni-directional connection. However, those speeds will not be achievable anytime soon because NVMe technology has not reached those points, yet. You can see the full specifications below:
- Delivering 128 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally via x16 configuration
- Utilizing PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) signaling
- Focusing on the channel parameters and reach
- Continuing to deliver the low-latency and high-reliability targets
- Improving power efficiency
- Maintaining backward compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology
Additionally, it is possible to achieve 800 Gigabit ethernet connection speed by utilizing the next-generation PCIe slots. The hardware adopting this technology is expected to be available in 2025.