PCI-SIG Unveils PCIe 8.0 At A Screaming-Fast 1TB/s For Hungry AI Workloads
Sorry buster, but your fancy build with its PCI Express 5.0 support is obsolete. Old news. Yesterday's tech. Woefully behind. And...we're just kidding, so don't go tossing your Intel Arrow Lake or AMD Ryzen 9000 series build in the garbage. That said, PCI SIG is always looking ahead and has now announced some preliminary specifications for its not-yet-finalized PCI Express 8.0 protocol.
What happened to PCIe 6 and 7? Both are already official, just not widely adopted. For a number of reasons, these things take time to be implemented on new platforms. Case in point, PCI-SIG finalized the PCIe 6.0 specification back in January 2022, and it took until last week for the first PCIe 6.0 SSD to arrive, courtesy of Micron's 9650. No consumer platforms support the PCIe 6.0 spec yet, so as enticing as the 9650's rated speeds are (up to 28GB/s), it's specifically intended for data center applications, not home use.
What about PCIe 7.0? It was finalized in June of this year with an optical twist, that being PCIe connectivity over fiber-optic cables using a retimer-based solution. Exciting stuff, and at the time, PCI-SIG teased that it was already looking ahead to PCIe 8.0.
Now several weeks later, PCI-SIG is sharing some additional details about PCIe 8.0. The biggest one is both impressive and not unexpected—the PCIe 8.0 specification will once again double the raw data rate of PCIe 7.0 to 256GT/s. That translates to an insanely-fast 1TB/s of bi-directional bandwidth over a x16 configuration, marking a new milestone for PCI Express connectivity.
"With the increasing data throughput required in AI and other applications, there remains a strong demand for high performance. PCIe technology will continue to deliver a cost-effective, high-bandwidth, and low-latency I/O interconnect to meet industry needs," said Al Yanes, PCI-SIG president and chairperson.
At least for the time being, PCI-SIG is citing the growing demands of AI and machine learning for fueling the need for ever-increasing PCI Express bandwidth. Likewise, it mentions high-speed networking, edge computing, quantum computing, and data-intensive markets like automotive, hyperscale data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), and military/autospace as segments that can potentially benefit from a massive increase in bandwidth.
Ignoring our opening jest, you shouldn't expect PCIe 8.0 to infiltrate the consumer space any time soon. PCI-SIG says PCIe 8.0 is planned for release to members by 2028, which realistically means it could be 2030 or later for it to reach home consumer platforms.
