PCI Express 7.0 Specification Released Alongside New PCIe Optical Interconnect Solution

The PCI-SIG organization has officially published the final specification for PCI Express 7.0, confirming the details initially announced in 2022. PCIe 7.0 offers a significant performance upgrade with a raw bit rate of 128 GT/s and a maximum bandwidth of up to 512 GB/s in an x16 configuration. This new generation of PCIe uses PAM4 signaling to achieve these speeds while improving power efficiency and maintaining backward compatibility with previous PCIe versions. Alongside the PCIe 7.0 specification, PCI-SIG introduced a new PCIe Optical Interconnect solution designed to extend PCI Express connectivity across longer distances, such as server racks and data center pods, using optical fiber. This solution builds on PCIe 6.4 and PCIe 7.0 technologies and supports features like multiplexing, enabling higher performance and more flexible deployment scenarios for AI, machine learning, cloud computing, 800G Ethernet, and quantum computing applications. The new specifications are currently available to PCI-SIG members and mark an important step forward in high-speed data transfer technology for a variety of advanced computing fields.