PCI-SIG (Special Interest Group), the organisation responsible for development of PCI specifications announced that generation 3 PCI-Express (PCI-E 3.0), is off its target launch time from late-2009 to Q2 2010. Although work on the bus is almost finished, there seems to be problems with implementing backwards-compatibility with older generations of PCI-E. Assuming PCI-E 3.0 is standardised in Q2 2010, one can expect implementing products (motherboards and expansion cards supporting PCI-E 3.0) only by a year later.
PCI-E 3.0 packs features that overcome the bottlenecks of PCI-E 2.0, such as the removal of the 8P/10b encoding scheme that added at least 20% data overhead for the 5 GT/s PCI-E 2.0, reducing it to 4 GT/s effective. At 8 GT/s the new bus will have effectively twice the bandwidth.
Source: TechConnect Magazine
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