PCI Express 7.0 Draft Finalized, Massive Bandwidth Boost Incoming

Imagine, for a moment, that you had a brand-new M.2 SSD rated for sequential transfers of over 15 GB/second. Obviously, it's the latest design, using four lanes of PCI Express 5.0 to achieve this immense throughput. Alternatively, it could be an x1 design—using PCIe 7.0. That's right kids: PCIe 7.0 offers per-pin transfer rates of 128 GT/s, meaning that an x16 configuration offers 256 GB/second of bandwidth one way.

If you're thinking that we just reported on a PCIe 7.0 draft, then you're stuck in January, when we reported that the PCIe 7.0 spec had hit the 0.7 revision and was open for comment from PCI-SIG members. Well, now, PCI-SIG says that the draft spec is finalized, and that it doesn't expect any more changes to the standard ahead of launch. "Unless any PCI-SIG ...