Al Yanes, the President and Chairperson of PCI-SIG, emphasized that the CopprLink Cable specifications were crafted to maintain consistency with previous connector formats, supporting evolutionary growth alongside PCIe technology advancements. The Electrical Work Group at PCI-SIG has commenced preliminary research on potential applications of CopprLink Cables for PCIe 7.0 technology, which is anticipated to achieve signaling speeds of 128.0 GT/s. The Internal Cable Specification under the CopprLink series allows for a maximum cable length of one meter within a single system unit. This specification finds applications in various internal connections such as those between motherboards and add-in cards, motherboard to backplane, and from one chip to another within a self-contained server platform node. It is particularly suited for use in data storage and compute nodes within data centers. On the other hand, the External Cable Specification supports similar signaling rates and extends the reach up to two meters, facilitating rack-to-rack connections. This specification is intended for broader applications including connections from central processing units (CPUs) to storage systems, memory, accelerators, and across accelerator fabrics in disaggregated server setups. This makes it especially relevant for applications in storage and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) tasks in data centers.

These CopprLink Cable specifications are now accessible for download by members of PCI-SIG, facilitating a range of uses in advanced and emerging data center technologies. This release underscores PCI-SIG’s ongoing commitment to the evolution and adaptation of the PCIe standard to meet the growing and changing demands of modern computing environments.