The PCI-Special Interest Group has decided to delay the release of the PCI-E 3.0 standard. The new standard was expected to be released late 2009 with the first products based on the new standard to appear in 2010. The SIG is now expected to only release the standard in Q2 2010 which will mean that products supporting the new standard will only appear in 2011.
The bus standard will have a transfer speed of 32GB/s which is double that of the current PCI-E 2.0 standard. PCI-E 3.0 will also require less power than PCI-E 2.0. PCI-E 3.0 will be completely backwards compatible with PCI-E 3.0 devices working with the PCI-E 2.0 bus and vice versa.
In a statement regarding the delay Al Yanes, president and chairman of PCI-SIG said, "We underestimated the sheer amount of work needed, but its more work than invention at this point.” The new TLP processing feature of PCI-E 3.0 is able to effectively manage cache to speed up data transfers.
Michael Reed
