PCI Takes on Thunderbolt, Big Worries for its Promoters

Did you know what lies behind the USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt controller? It's of course the bus that connects it to the rest of the system, PCI-Express. It is the 500 MB/s per lane interconnect that is indirectly responsible for the awesome bandwidth that today's plug and play interfaces such as eSATA 6 Gb/s, USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt 10 Gb/s enjoy. What if you could eliminate the protocol overhead that comes with any of those protocols, and make PCI-Express directly an interconnect? So thought the PCI Special Interest Group (SIG), the body that decides the fate of PCI. The SIG is planning to create a cabled version of PCI-Express Gen 3, that has no secondary protocol overhead, not even of the kind Infiniband has.