PCI-SIG, the PCI and PCIe standards body, recently confirmed that their latest PCIe 7.0 specification now has a data transfer rate of 128GT/s, which they previously said they could achieve.
This is based on version 0.9 of the specification, which features a data transfer rate of 512GB/s in both the transmit and receive directions using x16 lanes. This is a four-fold increase in data transfer rates compared to the PCIe 5.0 standard currently used in consumer computers.
PCI-SIG says that the new standard will be used by systems that require high data transfer rates, such as AI systems, machine learning, 800G Ethernet, quantum computing, and for aerospace and cloud systems.
With these high data transfer rates, the PCI-SIG's next focus seems to be on making the standard more energy efficient, reducing inter-system latency, strengthening signal integrity, and ensuring that the new standard supports previous standards such as PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0.