PCIe 4.0 at the end of 2017, the 5.0 under review

One year after the 0.7 revision of the PCI Express 4.0 specification, version 0.9 is in turn being finalized. The members of the PCI-SIG organization are thus called to carry out the review of the specifications before August 7, with a final version before the end of the year, either two years late.

The PCI Express 4.0 doubles the bit rate of 3.0 to reach 16 GT / s, always with 128b / 130b encoding or almost 2 GB / s for each line in each direction. This gain will be via the frequency, in return the usable connections without chips to resynchronize the signal will be shorter.

As a reminder, while PCI-SIG originally thought that this version 4.0 would be the last one using copper tracks, a version 5.0 was announced a year ago. Its specifications 0.3 are currently being reviewed by members. If the rhythm is the same as for version 4.0 we can expect a final version by 2020/2021, since the target rate is not yet public.