PCI Express 8.0 Is Coming, But You Won’t Use It For Years

PCI Express 5.0 is just becoming ubiquitous since last year, and PCI Express 6.0 should land on consumer devices at some point. But you’d be surprised by how far ahead the PCI-SIG is internally. Work on PCI Express 8.0 is already underway, and it’s insane.

We recently covered that the PCI Express 7.0 standard was already close to being finalized. Since then, the final release landed, and with it, the PCI-SIG, the association in charge of publishing and maintaining the PCI Express standard, already has its eyes set on PCI Express 8.0.

The new standard, targeted for a 2028 release, is set to double the data transfer rate yet again. So while the just-released PCI Express 7.0 over a full 16 lanes can do a 128 GT/s raw bit rate and is capable of transferring 512 GB/s bi-directionally, PCI Express 8.0 will be able to do a 256 GT/s raw bit rate and transfer a whopping 1 TB/s bi-directionally. There is no mention of what signaling method this generation will use, so for now, we can assume it continues to use PAM4 signaling, which was introduced with PCI Express 6.0.

To put that into perspective, that’s four times what the upcoming PCI Express 6.0 can do, eight times what PCI Express 5.0 can do, and 16 times what the venerable PCI Express 4.0, which is still widely used, can do. That’s insane, and a figure that dwarfs basically anything modern hardware can do. If a PCI Express 5.0 NVMe SSD can currently do sequential read speeds of up to 14,800 MB/s, a theoretical PCI Express 8.0 SSD could go all the way up to 118,400 MB/s. Reading or writing terabytes of data could be a matter of literal seconds.

The PCI-SIG claims that these improvements will be mostly important for AI, but frankly, the cadence of PCI Express releases has always been this aggressive and this frequent. We’re just increasingly getting into bonkers territory now. A theoretical PCI Express 9.0 will yet again double the bandwidth by the time it arrives during the next decade, but we’re already talking about hardware that’s very far away and currently surpasses all our technical capacity.

In fact, this is already pretty far away. The consumer market is just now embracing PCI Express 5.0 to the fullest, and we’re still awaiting for PCI Express 6.0 devices to land. And from there, we’ll need to wait a couple of years more for PCI Express 7.0 to make its way to hardware. If I had to guess, we’ll only begin seeing PCI Express 8.0 devices around 2030. That means we still have at least a 5-year wait ahead of us. Get comfortable.

Source: PCI-SIG via Liliputing