PCI SIG said this week that that it is developing cabling specifications for PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0 interfaces at 32 GT/s and 64 GT/s data transfer rates. The new cable specifications will be release in Q1 2024 and will be branded CopprLink, possibly to avoid any confusion with existing OCuLink cables and also to emphasize their copper nature.
The CopprLink 5.0 and 6.0 specifications are designed for datacenters and servers. They are meant to connect motherboards to backplanes, cards to backplanes, motherboards to expansion cards (e.g., accelerators), racks to racks, boards to boards within a rack, and even chips to chips at PCIe 5.0 (32 GT/s) and PCIe 6.0 (64 GT/s) speeds. The aim is to provide some additional flexibility to cases where typical PCIe links over printed circuit boards are inefficient or cannot be established for some reason. The mentioned cases do not include long-range connections, so we are probably talking about tens of centimeters here.
