As expected, by 2028 your PC will be internally passing a terabyte's worth of data per second as part of PCI Express 8.0. The PCI Special Interest Group said Tuesday that the PCIe 8 specification is due to be released in 2028, with speeds of 256 gigatransfers per second. In real-world terms, that works out to 1 terabyte per second being passed over a x16 connection via the PCI Express 8.0 bus. The new data rate should come as no surprise, as the SIG has consistently released iterative PCI Express standards that double the available bandwidth about every three years. In June, the PCIe SIG formally announced the PCI Express 7 specification, projected to be released in 2027.

Micron has shipped the first PCI Express 6.0 SSD, ramping up read and write speeds to unprecedented levels. This week, Micron shipped the Micron 9650 SSD, the world's first PCIe 6.0 SSD, designed for AI training and inference workloads. Unfortunately, those tasks take place in AI data centers, not home PCs. Micron will ship the drive in both a PRO (read-intensive) and MAX (write-intensive) configuration, with capacities ranging from 6.4TB to 30.72TB, depending on which flavor a customer buys. Technically, the drives use a PCI Express 6.2 interface, connecting to Micron's six-plane, ninth-generation (G9) flash memory.