PCI-SIG Announces PCI Express Architecture Performance Extension

Planned Specification Doubles Current Data Rate to 5GT/s

PORTLAND, Ore. – December 15, 2004 — The PCI-SIG®, the Special Interest Group responsible for PCI Express™ architecture, announced today that the data rate for the next planned revision of the PCI Express specification will be 5 Giga transfers per second. This new specification extends the performance capability of its flagship I/O interconnect architecture to meet the anticipated system requirements across computer and communication industry applications. The doubling of the data rate follows historical performance increases for I/O specifications in the industry.

The PCI-SIG board of directors considered market requirements and technical analysis of a range of data rates to obtain the most feasible, highest performance, backward compatible solution within the current PCI Express ecosystem. Platform implementation cost, high-volume manufacturability, system topologies, validation and interoperability were the key considerations studied by the PCI-SIG board members in the process to extend the PCI Express data rate to 5GT/s.

Many of the leading electrical experts who developed the PCI Express 1.0a specifications have been chartered to draft the new specification. The PCI-SIG expects to deliver the new specification in the second half of 2005 in time for product introductions beginning in 2007.

"The PCI-SIG continues to deliver on the promise of timely PCI Express enhancements to meet the ever-growing bandwidth requirements of the I/O industry," said Tony Pierce, PCI-SIG chairman. "The board of directors thoughtfully considered an array of technical and market data and arrived at the best decision for the next revision of the PCI Express architecture. We plan to deliver the new 5GT/s PCI Express specification consistent with our members’ expectations for 100% backward compatibility, low-cost manufacturability and world-class compliance and interoperability."

"The new 5GT/s PCI Express specification will enable the required performance boost for bandwidth-hungry applications such as cinema-quality graphics and multimedia, enterprise servers and storage, and multi-gigabit networking," said Ajay Bhatt, chairman of the PCI Express steering committee, responsible for managing the technical development and coordination of PCI Express specifications. "The electrical specification will introduce evolutionary methodologies to meet the technical challenges of running at 5 Giga transfers per second while maintaining compatibility with existing system topologies and silicon processes."

Benefits of PCI-SIG Membership
PCI-SIG members can participate in the review of all PCI specifications before they are released to the industry. If you are interested in becoming a member, please visit the PCI-SIG Web site at www.pcisig.com/membership. PCI-SIG members develop and maintain PCI Express specifications and are actively involved in defining compliance criteria and checklists, as well as other technical enabling collateral.

As an additional and extremely valuable benefit of PCI-SIG membership, members are given the right to receive patent licenses from any other member of our organization with necessary claims of patent embodied within our specifications. These licenses may be limited in scope to an implementation of a particular specification, but must be granted to all members on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. The proper use of the PCI Express trademark and logo by members in product promotion is described in the PCI-SIG logo usage guidelines available at http://www.pcisig.com/developers/procedures/logos.

About the PCI-SIG

The PCI-SIG is the Special Interest Group that owns and manages PCI specifications as open industry standards. The organization defines and implements new industry standard I/O (Input/Output) specifications as the industry's local I/O needs evolve. The PCI Special Interest Group was formed in 1992, and the organization became a nonprofit corporation, officially named "PCI-SIG" in the year 2000. Currently, more than 860 industry-leading companies are active PCI-SIG members worldwide. The PCI-SIG's current directors are employed by the following PCI-SIG member companies: AMD, Broadcom, HP, IBM, Intel, LSI Logic, Microsoft, Phoenix Technologies, and Texas Instruments. For more information about the PCI-SIG, and PCI-SIG membership benefits, contact the PCI-SIG by phone, at (503) 291-2569 (within the United States), or by fax at (503) 297-1090, or visit the PCI-SIG web site at http://www.pcisig.com.

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