The PCI-SIG organization officially announced that a new Optical Workgroup (Optical Workgroup) has been established to study the possibility of introducing an optical transmission interface for the PCIe specification.
The PCIe standard was proposed by Intel in 2001, and version 1.0 was released in 2003, with a data transmission rate of 2.5GT/s. The PCIe 6.0 version released in early 2022 has reached 64GT/s.
The 7.0 under development continues to double to 128GT/s, and the x16 bidirectional theoretical bandwidth is as high as 512GB/s.
In the past 20 years, although the appearance of the PCIe interface has not changed, the internal technology has been turned upside down, and it has always maintained backward and forward compatibility.
Only restricted by the traditional copper wire transmission mechanism, it is becoming more and more difficult to continue to improve PCIe technology, and more and more complex auxiliary mechanisms have to be added to control signal and data integrity.
Because of this, PCI-SIG decided to change the track, using the power of optical transmission, seeking to continue to improve speed, reduce power consumption and delay.
Of course, everything is still in its infancy, and it may not be until PCIe 9.0 can truly embrace optical transmission.
