- Spec for PCIE 7.0 has been announced
- It’s a new standard for even faster – incredibly fast – connections with PCIE Components on your PC
- However, the standard is still in the earliest stages and will not be here for a long time (PCIE 6.0 has not fully arrived yet) actually)
PCI (PCI Express) connection continues to forge forward, and already a new spec for a future generation of PCs has been announced, which is PCI 7.0.
Videocardz reports that PCI-SIG, the organization that oversees the standard, has announced PCI 7.0 and boasts how fast it will be. (Spoiler Alert: Really, Really Fast).
But wait a minute – aren’t we still on PCIE 5.0 these days? Well, yes, that’s what a (advanced) PC supports, and I’m coming back to exactly what’s going on with the development path to PCI Express Standard (and PCI 6.0) instantly.
PCIE 7.0 is currently a spec that has just been drawn and it will offer a data rate of 128GT/s, which is twice as large as PCIE 6.0 (which even doubled the transfer rate for PCIE 5.0).
With PCIE 7.0 you get support for up to 16 PCIe pitches (in a single slot) and up to 512 GB/s bandwidth in total (in both directions). PCIE CHANGE IS TOVEJS (which means data can be sent in both directions) Lines of communication that connect PCIE components-primer graphics card or SSDs (but also other various boards)-to the motherboard.
Overall, PCIe pathways facilitate all these key components working on your PC (read more about this here).
So while much faster speeds for this communication are actually a potentially large deal for the future, for the GPU’s performance and drives mainly, we look a lot at the future here – which means way down the line.
Analysis: Timescales – and PCIE 8.0 appear on the horizon
As I have already mentioned, we are on PCIE 5.0 right now. PCIE 6.0 was announced at the beginning of 2022 over three years ago and is still in development, though it is now approaching the finish line – we can even see that the first hardware that supports it will arrive later in the year (or early next).
So as you can imagine we look toward the end of decade Before PCIE 7.0 actually vomits. Until this milestone, hardware manufacturers will work away with the standard, develop and test prototypes and refine the final hardware for three or four years. And initially, this hardware will be used in like quantum calculation, data centers and other demanding tasks – not consumer PCs.
And in the meantime, PCI-SIG has confirmed that working on linking the PCI 8.0 standard has already begun.
So even though it’s all good and good, with these incoming standards that stand up and sound more blistering fast, what is the impact for consumers in the near future? Not much, frankly. Even the top, super-expensive examples of the best GPUs currently available are not pushing the limits of PCIe 5.0 yet-there are no need for anything faster, not even on the flashest PC.
However, there are niche cases where older PCIe standards are now inhibiting some new graphics cards.
An example is the RTX 5060 TI (or not ten) with 8GB of video RAM that loses some services when in a PCIe 4.0 because it is not slower standard and if your motherboard still uses PCIe 3.0, it is a world of performance pain. (For a detailed explanation of why this GPU is problematic this way, check here – AMDS RX 9060 XT is also withheld by its 8 GB VRAM).
Really, however, this is more than anything else (and honestly more to do with questionable decision making and configuration of these graphics cards in the first place). Still, with ever-faster PCIE standards rolling in-air inexorable towards us, in the future, even aging consumer PCs can do better with the dubious decisions that GPU producers throw on them.
As recently mentioned, it is important to promote PCIE-Spec and keep it very pioneering in maintaining standardization for the connection of PC components.
