The PCI Special Interest Group, or PCI-SIG, this week announced the speeds of the latest evolution to the PCI Express specification – PCI Express 3.0, also known as PCIe 3.0. PCIe 3.0 doubles the transfer rate of PCIe 2.0, bringing overall throughput to 8 gigatransfers per second, or GT/s.
PCI-SIG is designing the PCIe 3.0 standard for increased performance, but maintain backwards compatibility with PCIe and PCIe 2.0 devices. The group managed to double throughput of the existing PCIe 2.0 standard by removing the 8b/10b-encoding scheme used. The 8b/10b-encoding scheme took 20 percent overhead on the overall raw bit rate, according to the group. The PCIe 3.0 standard also includes new signaling and data integrity enhancements.
"Backwards compatibility was a strong selling point for allowing our customers to migrate their technologies to the future technology, knowing that they had the connection point of being able to plug in older adapters and new adapters into existing whichever, whether it was an old or new platform,” Chairman and President of PCI-SIG Al Yanes said in an interview. “This backwards compatibility we're maintaining with the 8GT spec.”
Cheers!
Maikeru Hatamoto
