PCI-SIG (Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group), an industry organization responsible for formulating and maintaining PCI Express (PCIe) standards, recently announced that significant progress has been made in the development of the next-generation PCIe 8.0 specification, which is expected to be officially released in 2028. The organization said that version 0.5 of the PCIe 8.0 specification Draft is now open to members, marking a key milestone in the development of this new generation of interconnect standards.
As early as 2022, PCI-SIG announced the PCIe 7.0 standard. After nearly four years, the organization once again confirmed that the development progress of its successor PCIe 8.0 is in line with expectations, and the new specification will be fully launched in 2028 as planned. Draft 0.5 integrates feedback collected from all parties during the previous version 0.3 review process. The development process continues to focus on maintaining backward compatibility with older PCIe generations, while achieving bandwidth improvements, reducing power consumption, and meeting latency and reliability goals.
In accordance with the convention of doubling the transmission speed of each generation of PCIe standards, PCIe 8.0 is designed to provide a single-lane (x1) transmission rate of 256.0 GT/s, and can achieve bidirectional bandwidth of up to 1.0 TB/s in a x16 (16-lane) configuration. This upcoming standard is designed to meet the growing needs of today's areas such as artificial intelligence/machine learning, high-performance computing, and high-speed networking.
From the technical specifications, the performance of PCIe 8.0 under different channel configurations is very eye-catching. The x1 configuration is capable of 64 GB/s, the x2 configuration is 128 GB/s, the x4 configuration is 256 GB/s, the x8 configuration is 512 GB/s, and the x16 configuration is capable of 1 TB/s. For comparison, PCIe 5.0, the highest standard currently in use, has a transfer speed of 128 GB/s in x16 configuration, which means that PCIe 8.0 will be eight times faster than PCIe 5.0. Theoretically, the sequential read and write speed of NVMe solid-state drives based on the PCIe Gen8 standard will reach 120,000 MB/s or even higher.
It is worth noting that PCI-SIG also confirmed that as signal transmission speeds continue to rise, the organization is evaluating new interface technology solutions. Since PCIe 8.0 will be eight times faster than PCIe 5.0, existing interfaces may not be able to meet the needs of the new standard, so a newly designed interface connector solution is being studied. However, specific details about this new interface have not yet been made public, and the technology may still be in the early stages of development.