PCI-SIG CopprLink cable specs for internal, external PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0 connections

PCI-SIG announced the new naming scheme for PCIe cables late last year, introducing CopprLink, and now we have some technical specifications and features to share.

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The specs for the next-generation CopprLink cabling are fantastic, with these new cables to be super-fast for AI systems, data storage, data centers, and external devices both internally, and externally.

PCI-SIG has the latest CopprLink specs for both PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0 with signaling at 32GT/s for PCIe 5.0, and a whopping 64GT/s for PCIe 6.0. These standards will evolve over time, with future bandwidth numbers to be even higher as PCI-SIG has teased PCIe 7.0 with 128GT/s speeds.

PCI-SIG said that CopprLink Internal and External cables will feature different connector form factors, reach, and various target applications. PCI-SIG explains: "The CopprLink Internal cables utilize the SNIA SFF-TA-1016 connector, which is an Internal Unshielded High Speed Connector System. The Internal cable has a maximum reach of 1m within a single system. The Internal cable example implementations include motherboard-to-add-in-card, motherboard-to-backplane, chip-to-chip and add-in-card-to-backplane inside a self-contained server platform node. The Internal cables are targeted for storage and data center compute nodes".

"The CopprLink External cables utilize the SNIA SFF-TA-1032 connector, which is a Multi-lane External High Speed Cable System. The External cable has a maximum reach of up to 2m. The External cable example implementations include CPU-to-storage, CPU-to-memory, CPU-to-accelerator, and accelerator fabrics in devices disaggregated server platform nodes. The External cables are targeted for storage and data center AI/ML where a longer reach is needed".