At the PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2022, the new PCI Express 7.0 standard was announced.
The PCI-SIG consortium, which deals with the development and standardization of PCI, announced that the final specifications of the new bus version will be adopted in 2025 and likely hit store shelves in 2027.
A single PCIe 7.0 lane can provide data transfer rates of up to 128 GT/s (gigatransactions per second) or 32 GB/s. Thus, 16 PCIe lanes in duplex (both directions) will be able to transfer data at speeds up to 512 GB/s, which is twice the capabilities of the PCIe 6.0 standard. And an SSD with a PCIe 7.0 x4 interface can theoretically provide read and write speeds close to 64 GB/s in each direction — the limit of upcoming drives with PCIe 5.0 x4 is 15.7 GB/s.
Other key features include improved power efficiency, low latency, and backwards compatibility with previous generations. However, PCIe 7.0 will require shorter traces to achieve these speeds, so motherboards can become more expensive as they are more likely to require additional components and thicker PCBs.
