The PCI Special Interest Group released a detailed timetable for the next-generation PCI Express 3.0 specification on Wednesday, with a final specification due by the fourth quarter and products possibly in early 2011.
The schedule for PCIe 3.0 products is somewhat flexible, however, given the wiggle room in the specification.
It's safe to say, however, that the spec is nearing the end of its technical revisions. In a press conference, PCI SIG chairman Al Yanes said that he had met with the workgroup chair on Tuesday, and that "we're basically done, technically."
PCI Express 3.0 is the next generation of the PCI Express specification, the main data pathway of the graphics cards and other expansion technologies of today's PCs. PCIe 2.0 encodes data using either 8 or 10 bits, transferring data at 5 gigatransfers per second, a metric that's governed by the number of lanes assigned to the channel. (Most graphics cards use a 16-lane, or x16, slot.)
PCIe 3.0, on the other hands, extends the bit encoding to either 128- or 130-bit encoding, and the data rate to 8 gigatransfers per second. Yanes and the SIG said an x16 PCIe 2.0 slot would transfer up to 16GBps of bandwidth; a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot would transfer 32 GBps.
maybe 40 or 100 GbE NICs, or SATA 6 Gbit/s RAID cards.
