AMD HD 7000 series to use PCI-E 3.0

The next generation of AMD graphics cards will be branded under the HD 7000 series name tag which follows on from the current HD 6000 series cards. According to Donanim haber the HD 7000 series cards will all use the PCI-E 3.0 interface, as well as being backwards compatible with older PCI-E 1.0 and 2.0 interfaces. Most motherboards today feature the PCI-E 2.0 interface but some of the latest motherboards are being shipped with PCI-E 3.0 capabilities including those most recently from ASRock.

The new bus doubles the bandwidth over PCI-E 2.0 with 1GB/s of bandwidth per lane. PCI-E 3.0 16X will have 32GB/s of bandwidth compared to 16GB/s in PCI-E 2.0 16X mode. The Codename of the next generation 28nm GPU's will be "Southern Islands", the first platforms to be PCI-E 3.0 compliant are likely to be Intel's Sandybridge-E processors. It is also unknown whether the motive for AMD moving to PCI-E 3.0 is to avoid a PCI-E 2.0 bottleneck or whether it is to meet compliance of the new PCI-E standard.