Stuff using PCI Express 5.0 is still coming out, while the PCI Express 6.0 spec is already finalized and will show up in PC parts eventually. But have you thought about what’s next after it? The PCI Express 7.0 specification is almost about to be finalized, and we already have a final draft.
The final draft of the PCI Express 7.0 specification has been submitted by the PCI-SIG, the association in charge of publishing and maintaining the PCI Express standard. While this isn’t the final spec, the “final draft” tends to be pretty final and there shouldn’t be any functional changes in the final version of the spec. Without getting too deep into the nitty-gritty details of the actual specification, the big takeaway for users here is that we have a 128 GT/s raw bit rate and it’s capable of transferring up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally. This is twice the bandwidth allowed by PCI Express 6.0 and four times the bandwidth allowed by PCI Express 5.0, and it could translate to insane speed gains for graphics cards and NVMe SSDs once products using the spec are finally on the market.
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This is the second generation of PCI Express using PAM4 signaling. This advancement is yet to debut in any commercial products as PCI Express 6.0 isn’t being used yet, but PAM4 is capable of transmitting two bits per symbol, effectively doubling the data rate compared to the previous NRZ signaling used in PCI Express 5.0 and lower generations. Maintaining signal integrity while doubling the bandwidth was becoming a real concern with NRZ signaling, so using PAM4 allows PCIe 6.0 to maintain a similar frequency to PCIe 5.0 signal integrity while making its usual generational improvements. As PCI Express 7.0 continues to use PAM4, it probably still has a decent ceiling for the next few gens before we need to replace it with something else.
Other improvements in PCI Express 7.0 include optimizations to improve power efficiency even further and, just like every other PCI Express generation, it has backward compatibility with previous generations. This means that you should have no problem putting a newer PCI Express 7.0 card on an older 6.0, 5.0, or 4.0 slot. It will run at the older gen’s speeds, but other than that, you should not run into any major issues—assuming, of course, your PC doesn’t have anything else that might make it incompatible. This has been a core principle of new iterations of the PCI Express standard, and it will probably continue this way for the foreseeable future.
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It might seem a bit weird to the average user to see that the PCI-SIG is already hard at work with PCI Express 7.0, considering that nothing on the market is using its predecessor, version 6.0, yet. And as a matter of fact, this is not weird or uncommon. The final specification of PCI Express 5.0, which is what most new hardware is using today, was released all the way back in 2019, when PCI Express 4.0 devices started coming out. We should see PCI Express 6.0 devices (that spec, by the way, was released in 2022) pop up any day now between this year and next year, while PCI Express 7.0 devices might not appear on store shelves until 2028 or 2029—and by then, we’ll probably already have the PCI Express 8.0 specification.
The final PCI Express 7.0 specification should be available later this year, but again, don’t expect to see it anywhere for a good few years.
