PCIe 8.0 launching in 2028 with a new connector, 8 times faster NVMe SSDs and GPUs

Back in 2022, the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group or PCI-SIG in short, the consortium which publishes and maintains PCI Express (PCIe) standards, announced PCIe 7.0 or PCIe Gen7.

Fast forward to today, nearly four years later, PCI-SIG has announced that it is making progress with its successor. That's because the PCIe 8.0 specification Draft 0.5 is now available to members, marking a major milestone in the development of the next-gen interconnect standard. The organization reiterated that PCIe 8.0 remains on track for a full release by 2028.

The Draft 0.5 release includes changes based on feedback gathered from earlier version 0.3 reviews. PCI-SIG also noted that the development process continues to focus on maintaining backward compatibility with previous PCIe generations while improving bandwidth, reducing power consumption, and meeting latency as well as reliability targets.

As is the case with every new PCIe generation, PCIe 8.0 is being designed to deliver double the transfer speeds of last gen, which will equate to 256.0 GT/s per lane (x1), for a total of up to 1.0 TB/s of bi-directional bandwidth in an x16 (16-lane) configuration. The upcoming standard is expected to support growing demands for AI/ML, high-performance computing (HPC), and high-speed networking, which are quite common these days.

The table below compares PCIe 5.0, which is the highest currently available standard, with the next generation:

Hence technically, PCIe Gen8 NVMe SSDs will be rated for sequential speeds of up to 120,000 MB/s or more.

Interestingly, PCI-SIG also confirmed that it is reviewing new connector technologies as signaling speeds continue to rise. As you see from the above table, PCIe 8.0 will be eight times faster than Gen5. So far though there are no details of it in the public domain as it is likely in its early stages of development. You can find the press release here on PCI-SIG's official website.