The PCIe 7.0 specification has now been released, while many of us are still waiting for PCIe 6.0 to materialize in consumer products. The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) announced on Wednesday that PCIe 7.0 is now available to members of its organization, delivering a theoretical maximum bandwidth speed of 512GB per second in both directions, across a x16 connection. PCI-SIG says that PCIe 7.0 will be backward compatible with previous PCI Express versions, but there’s no mention of plans to bring it to everyday desktop SSDs or GPUs any time soon. Here’s a snapshot of all the improvements PCIe 7.0 has over PCIe 6.0. Image: PCI-SIGMeanwhile, PCI-SIG says that pathfinding for PCIe 8.0 is “already in progress.” With any luck, PCIe 6.0 will have made its consumer debut by the time the next-gen specifications have been finalized in 2028.