PCI-SIG, the industry organization behind the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) standard for computer expansion cards, has released the PCI Express Base 3.0 specification, the next evolution of the general-purpose PCI Express I/O standard.
PCI Express is used in consumer, server, and industrial applications as a motherboard-level interconnect (to link motherboard-mounted peripherals) and as an expansion interface for add-in boards.
The PCIe 3.0 architecture includes a 128-bit/130-bit encoding scheme and a data rate of 8 GT/sec (gigatransfers per second), twice the interconnect bandwidth of the PCIe 2.0 specification. PCIe 3.0 technology also maintains backward compatibility with previous PCIe versions.
This specification describes the PCI Express architecture, interconnect attributes, fabric management and the programming interface required to design and build systems and peripherals that are compliant with the PCI Express Specification.