PCI Express 8.0 doubles the speed

The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) aims to complete the PCI Express 8.0 (PCIe 8.0) standard by 2028. The company consortium is staying true to its scheme and wants to double the speed again. Compared to PCIe 7.0, the transfer rate of a single lane will increase from 16 to 32 gigabytes per second and direction.

With four lanes, as is usual with NVMe SSDs, this would be 128 GByte/s and with 16 lanes for graphics cards, 512 GByte/s. This even exceeds the memory speed of current mid-range graphics cards such as Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5060 (448 GByte/s) and AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT (322 GByte/s).

The PCI-SIG quotes double values because it combines the transfer rates for both directions. This means that a terabyte per second would be mathematically possible.

Distribution still many years away

However, it will be many years before this technology arrives in desktop PCs and notebooks – even after finalization. AMD, Intel and PC manufacturers are already hesitant about PCIe 6.0 and do not expect compatible platforms until 2030. New PCIe generations are primarily intended for data centers. PCIe 6.0 is expected to be introduced as early as 2026.

To double the speed, PCIe 8.0 doubles the data signal rate compared to 7.0 to 256 gigatransfers per second. The signaling method with four-stage pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4), which the PCI-SIG introduced with the 6.0 generation, will be retained.

The developers are looking at new "connector technology", but do not elaborate on this point. PCIe 7.0 is already intended for cable connections via copper and fiber optic cables but does not yet explicitly have any standardized connectors –; it is possible that the PCI-SIG will introduce these with PCIe 8.0. The developers emphasize that PCIe 8.0 remains downward compatible with previous versions. The previously known mainboard slots should therefore be retained.

(mma)