PCI Express 2.0 Promises Faster Bus Speeds and Higher Performance

By John Gawley on January 18th, 2007

PCI Express 2.0 is the newest incarnation of the ”bus”, a device by which the CPU connects to the chipset, and allows all of the PC components to talk to each other. PCI Stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect.

According to the Web site of the PCI Express Special Interest Group, also known as PCI-SIG, one of the most significant features of 2.0 is the doubling of the interconnect bit rate, which substantially kicks up bandwidth. As a result, the CPU can communicate with other components faster than before.

PCI-SIG reports, “The performance boost to 5 GT/s is by far the most important feature of the PCI Express 2.0 specifications. It effectively increases the aggregate bandwidth of a 16-lane link to approximately 16 GB/s.“ PCI Express 2.0 will increase bus speed and communication between essential PC components

The report goes on to say that the higher bandwidth will enable product designers to implement “narrower interconnect links” to achieve high performance, while reducing cost.

But according to IDC analyst Bob O’Connell, the speed of a PC will not be radically changed by the PCI Express 2.0, since it’s just one component of a PC. “It can definitely help overall system performance,” he says, “but by itself, it is not going to have a dramatic impact.”

A 5-port PCI card from Cables to Go Future of Slots in Question

One of the key features of the new spec, according to the PCI Special Interest Group, is the amped-up slot power, which give oomph to high-performance graphics cards. But according to O’Donnell, the main concern is the dwindling production of add-in card technology. “More and more of the components are beginning to be integrated into the chipset and the motherboard, so the need for the slots is diminishing.”

Reaching the Consumer

Another issue is implementation rate. “We are just now starting to see adoption of express cards in notebooks,” he says, “and those were released in 2004.” So it’s difficult to gauge how quickly products based on the 2.0 spec will reach the masses.
“With these types of standards, we just don’t know,” says O’Donnell. “Once the standard is developed, the chipsets have to be created; so we’re looking at roughly 6 months to a year.”