PCIe 2.0 to arrive by Christmas

Written by Tim Smalley

May 22, 2007 | 13:39

Tags: #2 #20 #complaint #december #express #launch #market #pci #pcie #pci-express #products

Companies: #christmas

PCI-SIG, the special interest group that oversees the PCI-Express specification, said that PCI-Express 2.0 compliant products are on schedule to appear on the market in December at a PCI-SIG developer conference held yesterday in San Jose.

According to the special interest group, the first applications for the new specification will be the same ones that benefited from PCI-Express 1.0 and 1.1.

This means we'll hopefully see a host of graphics cards, RAID controllers and ultra high-speed networking devices showing up on the market. PCI-SIG was also keen to highlight the fact that the new specification would be backwards compatible with all other versions of the standard.

The new specification was finalised in January, which includes doubling the transfer rate from 2.5Gbps to 5.0Gbps and also doubling the amount of power that can be drawn through the slot to 150W.

In addition, the new spec introduces a new 8-pin supplementary power connector, capable of delivering 150W. This made its first appearance on the Radeon HD 2900 XT.

Intel apparently demonstrated unreleased graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia on its Stoakley chipset for workstations, which offers two PCI-Express 2.0 ports supporting 16 lanes each. Graphics are undoubtedly the major driver for the new specification, but 10Gbit/sec networking devices will also use PCI-Express 2.0's bandwidth.

The first consumer chipset supporting PCI-Express 2.0 will be Intel's X38 Express, which is set for release in week 38 of this year, so from that perspective we can start to see products appearing after that.

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