October 10, 2006 -- The PCI-SIG , the special interest group responsible for advancing the industry-standard PCI Express I/O architecture, announced that it has made the release candidate (revision 0.9) of its PCI Express Base 2.0 specification available for review by member companies.
According to a press release, with work on the specification nearly complete, the PCI-SIG has assigned its technical workgroups to investigate and develop the scope for potential extensions of the PCI Express protocols to meet future requirements, such as improved dynamic power controls, optimized synchronization, coherency hints, and more efficient transaction ordering.
Such enhancements will be evaluated for possible inclusion in a collection of incremental extensions to the PCI Express architecture intended to improve the range of design options available to emerging markets and computing models. The affected technical workgroups have issued a call for new membership and will study future extensions such as, but not limited to, those within the recent Geneseo proposal from PCI-SIG member companies. These technical workgroups, which are open to all members of the organization, will solicit input from other member companies and recommend future directions to enhance the PCI Express protocols.
PCI-SIG has released the 0.9 version of the PCIe Base 2.0 specification for member review and comment. The specification extends the data rate of PCIe to 5 GT/s in a manner compatible with the existing PCIe 1.1 specifications that support 2.5 GT/s signaling. A number of improvements have been made to the protocol and software layers of the architecture, a product of more than three years of design experience by the PCI-SIG members. A companion Card Electromechanical (CEM) 2.0 specification is also currently in review at 0.5 by the PCI-SIG members.
"PCI-SIG is pleased with the impressive progress in the proliferation of the PCI Express technology by our members," says Al Yanes, PCI-SIG chairman. "We are committed to providing a compelling technology roadmap for our flagship PCI Express architecture. With the release of PCIe Base 2.0 for member review, we look forward to new protocol improvements, and IOV and PCIe Cable specifications."
Continuing ongoing specification development, PCI-SIG working groups are completing the suite of specifications to enable I/O device virtualization and sharing. The draft Address Translation Services (ATS) 0.9 specification has been released for member review. The Single-Root and Multi-Root device sharing specifications are in various stages of development and will be released to members for review in the near future.
The PCIe Cable specification has been released to members at revision 0.9 for 60-day review. The new specification supports cables up to 10 meters in length running at 2.5 Gb/s. Cable assemblies have already been measured and validated by the workgroups. The specification will primarily be implemented in disaggregated I/O and backplane usage models. PCI-SIG has decoupled this specification from the PCIe 2.0 specification (5.0 GT/s) and anticipates the final version of the cable specification to be ready by year-end 2006.
