PCI Express Base spec 2.0 finalised

THE PCI SIG group announced that the PCI Express standard exists from now on in its Base 2.0 specification.

This spec calls for 100 per cent compatibility with all existing PCIe 1.1 products, but the speed is bumped from 2.5GT/s to 5GT/s ( Giga Transfers per second.

The bandwidth per lane has increased from 500MB/s to 1GB/s, thus having a card with support for PCIe 2.0 x16 will yield in aggregate bandwidth of 16GB/s.

Besides the bandwidth, PCIe Gen2 brings many new features to the table, features that should enable easier development of other PCIe products, such as x1 cards. This cards as we all know, were shot down by many manufacturers since motherboard industry did not produce a lot of x1 compliant products, but rather had unusable x1 slots.

The first products based on the new Gen2 standard will probably be autumn refresh of DX10 GPUs such as G80 and R600, but this is only an informed guess. µ

L'INQ
PCI Express Base 2.0 specification

See Also
Forget PCI Express, it's time for PCI Express 2
PCIe 2.0 aims to offer twice as much bandwidth