PCIexpress 5 SSD close up.
PCIexpress 5 SSD close up.
The final draft for the PCIexpress 7.0 standard has been finalized and the PCI-SIG members who have been working on it have settled on it just being crazy fast. No ifs or buts. It doubles the performance of the PCIe 6 specification, making it possible for each PCIe 7 lane to have a maximum bandwidth of 32GBps on a single lane. That would give x4 slots (the kind used for SSDs and add-in cards) up to 128GBps, and x16 slots (used for graphics cards) up to 512GBps.
It's just a shame that we won't see hardware supporting these capabilities for many years to come.
When it comes to the raw performance of add-in cards and SSDs, the hard limit is the PCIexpress port. That's why the fastest PCIe 4 SSDs tend to have sustained read and write speeds at almost, but less than, 8GBps. The same goes for PCIexpress 5.0 drives, which are starting to almost max out their PCIe generation: around 15GBps. But PCIe 7 is already making future promises of drives that can go way, way beyond that.
PCI lane speed chart.
This chart is for maximum bandwidth, more than doubling the throughput for each direction.
Credit: PCI-SIG
At up to 128GBps, you could transfer entire games from drive to drive in just a second or two. There's even an argument to be made that RAM would become less necessary at that kind of speed—although by the time we can actually use PCIe 7 SSDs, much faster memory will also be available.
And that's the only trouble with getting excited about future PCIexpress generations. PCIe 7 might now have a draft specification, but that's purely theoretical. Companies actually need to build devices that support the technology, and we're three years on from the PCIexpress 6 specification being ratified and haven't seen anything yet.
As PCWorld points out, even PCI-SIG doesn't see PCIe 7 devices coming to consumers any time soon. It will instead be used in data centers to allow for ultra-fast Ethernet (800 gigabits!) as well as advanced AI model training.
Consumer devices wouldn't be able to make much use of it even if it was available. There's little real-world difference in applications and games using a PCIe 5 SSD over a PCIe 4 option, so quadrupling that top drive's performance again wouldn't do much. It's cool, and we all love to watch the numbers go up but don't expect anything tangible out of PCIe 7 for many years to come.