The technological advances in computing have a fairly easy cycle to understand; many of the standards that exist in terms of hardware are renewed practically every two or three years, something that also happens with the well-known PCI standard. In this case we are referring to PCI Express, since the news we know about this version suggests that it will be finalized during this year, which implies that companies will be able to begin trying to develop products that implement the seventh version, the PCIe 7.0although this does not imply that we will see components with this standard on the market soon.
One of the main aspects that we can find when talking about any computer system are the standards they use, these allow different manufacturers not to have to find a way to use their own specific specifications for certain components when creating a specific device. . If we take motherboards as an example, they all have a similar format both in the design they have (ATX, Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX…) as well as in some aspects such as the connectors and slots they use (PCIe, USB…) , allowing them to only need to focus on implementing these standards in the best possible way.
A standard that will arrive with a fairly predictable improvement
Every three years we can find how the PCIe standard is updated, and the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) is quite clear that it wants to maintain the arrival of new versions of this data bus every three years even when not Previous versions have been implemented on the market. That is why they have published version 0.7 of the specifications of PCIe 7.0 to find out if its members will approve it or not, with a fairly clear objective, publishing the final specifications throughout this year.
The main reason why we see how these standards are launched before the previous ones have been adapted to the market really has to do with the fact that they seek to guarantee that these interfaces can keep up with advances in hardware, avoiding bottlenecks. for future developments. In this case, the difference with which this new version of PCIe would arrive would be quite large, since with each new generation what is sought is to double the previous speed.
To understand it in a simple way, PCIe 7.0 would double the limits of PCIe 6.0, that is, it would go from offering a transfer speed of 64 GT/s to 128 GT/s, which translates into a bidirectional transfer speed of 512GB/s on a 16 lane or x16 configuration. Obviously, if we compare it with PCIe 5.0, which is the standard that companies are trying to adopt now, we will see that the improvement is obviously much greater since it offers “only” 32 GT/s.
Another of the key aspects that PCIe 7.0 will have will be the use of the 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) signaling introduced in PCIe 6.0, which allows two bits of data to be encoded per clock cycle, that is, it will double the speed. of data transmission with respect to the signaling technology used in PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0.
Although, as you can well imagine, the fact that the specifications of the standard are published this year does not imply that we are going to see it soon on the market, that is, we have not yet practically seen hardware components with PCIe 5.0 on a massive scale, while the PCIe 6.0 are literally still in development, meaning until we see a test piece of hardware with PCIe 7.0 it will surely be more than 4-5 years.
