PCI SIG Releases PCIe 2.0

symbolset notes that The Register is reporting that PCI SIG has released version 2.0 of the PCI Express base specification: "The new release doubles the signaling rate from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps. The upshot: a x16 connector can transfer data at up to around 16GBps." The PCI-SIG release also says that the electromechanical specification is due to be released shortly.

Comments

Re:Sigh

[Indy1]

its a good thing. By getting the standard approved way before its needed, it gives everyone (hardware oem's, os developers, etc) plenty of time to integrate support for it. Rushing critical standards like this leads to nasty problems (think VLB) or outright non adoption.

When the ATA standards 33, 66, 100, etc, were adopted, everyone was saying the same thing - why in the hell is it needed. But by getting it adopted and published before it was needed, it gave all the chipset and motherboard vendors time to build it in their products. Result - in the past 10 years hard drives have NOT been bottlenecked transferring data between the drive and motherboard. You can get a screaming fast hard drive, stick it in an older motherboard (say with in 2-3 years of the hard drive's date), and it almost always works without issues.

Pci-e 1.0 took too long to come out. The Pci bus has been overwhelmed by modern video cards (which led to the AGP hack, which fortunately worked fairly well), scsi and raid controllers, ethernet cards (pci cant even give a single gig nic enough bandwidth), usb 2.0, firewire 400 and 800, etc etc etc. Pci-X was complex, expensive, and not widely available. It also ate up too much of the motherboard real estate.

By getting on the ball with Pci-e 2.0, we won't see the same problem again for a while. Now only if firewire 800 and e-sata could be more common........

Re:Why 'PCI'?

[Andy Dodd]

It has more to do with PCI than you think.

While the electrical interface has changed significantly, the basics of the protocol have not changed much at all, at least at a certain layer.

The end result is that at some layer of abstraction, a PCI-Express system appears identical to a PCI system to the operating system (as another poster mentioned). BTW, with a few small exceptions (such as the GART), AGP was the same way. Also, (in theory) the migration path from PCI to PCI Express for a peripheral vendor is simple - A PCI chipset can be interfaced with a PCI Express bus with some "one size fits all" glue logic, although of course that peripheral will suffer a bandwidth penalty compared to being native PCIe.

Kind of similar to PATA vs. SATA - Vastly different signaling schemes, but with enough protocol similarities that most initial SATA implementations involved PATA-to-SATA bridges.