Twice the bandwidth on the same connector

Jan 16, 2007 13:25 GMT  ·  By

PCI-SIG, the special interest group responsible with the ratification and further development of the PCI Express standard, has announced that the final specifications of the PCIE 2.0 standard have been approved and are available for viewing on their website.

Regarding the future of PCIE, Al Yanes, PCI-SIG chairman and president claims: "In today's world, applications are becoming more advanced and are requiring more bandwidth. This is the perfect time to release PCIe 2.0, which not only supports high-bandwidth applications such as high-end graphics, but also adds many new architectural enhancements."

There are many functional differences between the pcie 2.0 standard and the older 1.x interface but physically, it doubles the bandwidth and working frequency over the previous 1.x revision (5GHz vs. 2.5GHz and 16GBps vs. 8GBps for a 16x lane setup). In addition to the enhanced features, the new design also improves the power consumption limit and allows for the motherboard manufacturers to "design more intelligent devices to optimize platform performance and power consumption while maintaining interoperability, low cost and fast market introduction".

There are a lot of architectural enhancements that will be integrated in the future 2.0 standard but among the most important are the following: - Dynamic link speed management allows developers to control the speed at which the link is operating; - Link bandwidth notification alerts platform software (operating system, device drivers, etc) of changes in link speed and width; - Capability structure expansion increases control registers to better manage devices, slots and the interconnect; - Function-level reset provides an optional mechanism to reset functions within a multi-function device; - Power limit redefinition enables slot power limit values to accommodate devices that consume higher power.

There is more stuff I can say about the future of PCIE, but I have to point out that leaving the speed part, the new standard supports an additional 75W of power that will be drawn directly from the slot. So the guys at PCI-SIG were thinking at 300W video cards (150W from the slot and 2*75W from the PCIE connectors). Oh, joy!