Holy cow! PCI express is entering its second generation already? Well, it’s getting there. According to Extreme Tech, the PCI Special Interest Group has finally settled on on a 5-gig transfer rate for PCI Express 2.

Think about it people, 5-gig transfer rates. It is just a wonderful thing to say. Although for now, the existing PCI Express is more than enough for me personally.

The PCI Special Interest Group has settled on a 5-gigatransfer rate for the second generation of PCI Express.

In an interview, Tony Pierce, chairman of the PCI SIG and a technical evangelist at Microsoft Corp., said the SIG will announce the so-called “Gen 2″ transfer rate within the hour.

Since PCI Express is a point-to-point connection capable of scaling to different widths, the Gen 2 increase equates to 5-gigabits/sec per wire pair, in each direction, double the bandwidth of the current PCI Express specification. A single, basic PCI Express serial link is a dual-simplex connection using two low-voltage pairs of differentially driven signals — a receive pair and a send pair, as noted in this ExtremeTech PCI Express tutorial. Graphics cards typically use a “x16″ configuration, where sixteen PCI Express “x1″ lanes run in parallel.

The PCI-SIG expects to deliver the new specification in the second half of 2005 in time for product introductions beginning in 2007.