Technological advances in computing have a fairly simple cycle to understand; many standards that exist in terms of hardware are renewed practically every two or three years, which also happens with the famous 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 can start 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 soon on the market.
One of the main aspects that can be found when talking about any computer system are the standards that they use, these allow different manufacturers to not 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 their design (ATX, Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX…) and in certain aspects such as the connectors and slots they use ( PCIe, USB…), which allows them to focus solely on the optimal implementation of these standards.
A standard that will arrive with a fairly predictable improvement
Every three years we can find out how the PCIe standard is updated, and the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) makes it clear that it wants to keep new versions of this data bus arriving every three years, even if this is not the case. versions have been implemented in the market. That's why they released version 0.7 of the specifications of PCIe 7.0 to know whether its members will approve it or not, with a fairly clear objective, publishing the final specifications throughout this year.
The main reason we see these standards being released before previous ones have been brought to market is actually because they seek to ensure 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 we seek 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 a transfer speed of 64 GT/s to 128 GT/s, which translates into a bi-directional transfer speed of 512 GB/s. s on a 16 channel or x16 configuration. Obviously, if we compare it with PCIe 5.0, which is the standard that companies are now trying to adopt, we will see that the improvement is obviously much greater since it “only” offers 32 GT/s.
Another key aspect of PCIe 7.0 will be the use of 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 i.e. it will double. the speed of data transmission compared 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 on the market soon, that is, we do not have still practically seen hardware components with PCIe 5.0 on a large scale, while PCIe 6.0s are literally still in development, which means that until we see a test hardware with PCIe 7.0, it will surely take more than 4 to 5 years.