From PC World: Anyone who’s bought or researched buying a new SSD for their PC understands their limitations: SSDs are often constrained by the PCI Express bus to the rest of the PC, and they generate tons of heat. The architects of PCI Express are thinking about a solution: replacing PCIe’s electrical interconnect with one that uses light instead.
The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) is forming a workgroup to develop a standardized optical interconnect that could replace the electrical bus found in PCs. Replacing electrons with photons could save power and heat by reducing resistance, as well as improving the overall performance of the PC itself.
PCI Express is possibly the most important bus technology within the PC, connecting its most important components: the processor, the external GPU, and the SSD. Any changes to the PCI Express specification dramatically improve the PC’s performance. A shift from electricity to light, however, would be revolutionary.
Don’t expect optical PCIe to arrive any time soon, however, either as a specification or as an actual product. For one thing, the PCI Express 7 specification is currently scheduled to be released in 2025, offering a whopping 128 gigatransfers per second. But as we bemoaned in our roundup of the best internal SSDs, the state of the art is a PCI Express 4 SSD — a standard, incidentally, that was finalized in 2017.
It’s also unclear what technology the SIG will adopt, either. In its statement, the SIG described its goals in brief terms: “this new optical workgroup will work to make the PCIe architecture more optical-friendly,” it said. Traditionally, the SIG’s role is to simply publish a standard, ensuring interconnectivity and allowing manufacturers to work to a common standard.
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