PCIe 7.0 Specification on Track for Full Release in 2025

Tsing

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PCI-SIG, the electronics industry consortium behind the ubiquitous PCI standard, has announced that the first official draft of the PCIe Gen 7 specification is now available for members to download, and with it comes the confirmation that PCIe 7.0 remains on track for full release next year, in 2025.

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We're not even on 6.0 yet, and most consumers and companies haven't really adopted 5.0 yet (which felt like it came out too soon). The only things using 4.0 (consumer-side) that I know of are SSDs, graphics cards don't even need that kind of bandwidth yet. SSDs are definitely the only things using 5.0, and will no doubt be first to use 6.0 and 7.0.

I still feel like you don't even really need faster than 3.0 SSDs. I mean, I experienced R&C: Rift Apart's loading with gimped DirectStorage (Win10 not Win11) on a 3.0 drive, and that sh1t was insaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane. Almost reminded me of the days of loading from cartridges. I can scarcely imagine faster. We don't really need faster SSDs, we need to better utilize the ones we already got, and DirectStorage helps a lot with that. And of course the NVMe protocol continues to get updated as well (although I don't know when's the last time it was updated - January 2024 according to Wikipedia).
 
History has always confirmed that the mantra of "we'll never need xxx that fast or that much" has always been proven false over time for computer hardware. Eventually, I'm sure there will be advantages, and it will become the minimum, not the average or maximum desired performance. It is inevitable. In the short term? Of course not.

There are major advantages for faster PCIe, because fewer wires/lanes, are needed to achieve higher performance. Anytime you can reduce wires, you reduce cost and complexity. In addition, it will allow for many more PCIe lanes per channel. It has major advantages, outside of pure throughput.

As for what they mean by it is full release, I suspect they mean this is when the draft becomes gold and finalized, and specs sent to manufactures to start designing parts. Which means, actual hardware release will come much later, I'd suspect 2026 and beyond. Naturally, it will come to server and enterprise-grade equipment first, and then start to trickle down to the little people.
 
History has always confirmed that the mantra of "we'll never need xxx that fast or that much" has always been proven false over time for computer hardware. Eventually, I'm sure there will be advantages, and it will become the minimum, not the average or maximum desired performance. It is inevitable. In the short term? Of course not.
Yeah I just meant for now, in the short term. SATA SSDs used to feel ridiculously fast to me, but now they feel slow too. But I haven't gotten to that point with PCIe 3.0 SSDs yet.

As for what they mean by it is full release, I suspect they mean this is when the draft becomes gold and finalized, and specs sent to manufactures to start designing parts. Which means, actual hardware release will come much later, I'd suspect 2026 and beyond. Naturally, it will come to server and enterprise-grade equipment first, and then start to trickle down to the little people.
Yeah I realize this is just them working on the specification, which is not complete yet. PCIe 6.0 spec got finished a good while ago, and yeah it will be a while before hardware supporting it starts showing up. Same happened with all of the previous ones, and USB, and SATA, and HDMI, and DP, and other sh1t like that.

Yeah enterprise gets sh1t first, and I have no doubt they are making full use of PCIe 5.0 now, and would very much use the f*ck outta 7.0 when it comes out.
 
Yea enterprise especially multimedia companies and VERY large DB's LOVE some high bandwidth high speed drives. Especially streaming services and such.

I dare say they have the capacity in most part (Well HBO Max or whatever still seems to have some trouble meeting peak demand.) But others have it down cold.

PCIE 7 drives will improve their density meeting demand with less power and less rack space. Overall they don't have 'storage' limitations more 'caching' issues with getting all of the data in demand cached and delivered across multiple devices. (Where HBO continues to fall down.)

This is based on outside observation not known reality at this time.

What I do know is Netflix leases rack space in Major cities and distribution centers to host servers to deliver content that are very high speed and very dense data storage. It's a balancing act in cost between density, and speed of service. PCIE 7 will help with storage, and networking I/O to a large degree. So they won't need as many storage devices to deliver the volume of content in demand.

At least until they start offering 8k streaming.
 
Wonderful, more power and speed to be available in motherboards of 2000$ plus. Here in the sub 300$ real world we get to choose between all of 1 sdd slot full speed or the pcie full speed, both full speed are just too much, 2 full speed ssd and a full speed pcie is monocle territory.
 
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