With the introduction of PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0 data connection technology, it is expected that this technology will face the issue where the data transmission speed will reach a saturation state within a few years.
This will be an issue for situations in the future where the transmission rate between the CPU and the components is very important, especially for the purpose of machine learning, artificial intelligence and high-scale data processing.
With this, PCI-SIG, the PCI technology supervisory group, has recently introduced a group for the development of technologies that use optical connections called the PCI-SIG Optical Workgroup.
The use of optical connections for the purpose of data transmission is not something new, in fact this technology is used to enable internet connections with fast data transmission rates around the world. This is the same concept that PCI-SIG wants to develop in their latest data connection technology.
Not only will this new connection increase the rate of data transmission between server and client machines, it is also able to increase the rate of processing and data transmission between components more quickly, and also reduce the rate of sudden power consumption, reducing the carbon footprint for data centers in the future too.
The development of this new technology does not mean that it will replace existing PCIe technologies, such as PCIe 5.0 and 6.0. PCIe 5.0 was just widely introduced last year with the introduction of AMD and Intel processing chip series, while PCIe 6.0 with a data transmission rate of 64GT/s and PCIe 7.0 with a data transmission rate of 128GT/s.