PCI-SIG®, or the Special Interest Group responsible for PCI Express® industry-standard I/O technology, today announced the availability of the PCI Express Base 2.0 specification.
After a 60-day review of revision 0.9 of the specification in Fall 2006, members of the PCI-SIG finalized and released PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0, which doubles the interconnect bit rate from 2.5GT/s to 5GT/s to support high-bandwidth applications.
The specification seamlessly extends the data rate to 5GT/s in a manner compatible with all existing PCIe 1.1 products currently supporting 2.5GT/s signalling. The key benefit of PCIe 2.0 is its faster signalling, effectively increasing the aggregate bandwidth of a 16-lane link to approximately 16 GB/s or four times the current maximum.
The higher bandwidth will allow product designers to implement narrower interconnect links to achieve high performance while reducing cost, according to PCI-SIG.
