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[Porkinator]

The PCI Special Interest Group, or PCI-SIG, this week announced the speeds of the latest evolution to the PCI Express specification – PCI Express 3.0, also known as PCIe 3.0. PCIe 3.0 doubles the transfer rate of PCIe 2.0, bringing overall throughput to 8 gigatransfers per second, or GT/s.

PCI-SIG is designing the PCIe 3.0 standard for increased performance, but maintain backwards compatibility with PCIe and PCIe 2.0 devices. The group managed to double throughput of the existing PCIe 2.0 standard by removing the 8b/10b-encoding scheme used and additional optimizations. The 8b/10b-encoding scheme took 20 percent overhead on the overall raw bit rate, according to the group. The PCIe 3.0 standard also includes new signaling and data integrity enhancements


-------------------------------------------45 nm Core 2 Duo-------------------------------------
WOLFDALE CORE 2 Duo processors might not be due on shelves for another few months, but engineering samples are already rolling off the fabs - and one has made its way into a benchmarking rig over at HKEPC.
The chip, designed for next-gen desktops, is built on Intel's new 45nm process, making it a smaller version of the existing Core 2 chips. It supports all the usual Intel instruction gubbins, including the new SSE4 and 64-bit instructions. The engineering sample benchmarked was running at 2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB and stacked up 6MB of L2 cache.
Compared against an existing E6550 Conroe chip (same speeds, only 4MB cache) the Wolfdale performs impressively. Clock for clock, performance is up 19 per cent in OpenGL rendering, and 13 per cent in ScienMark's molecular dynamics test. SSE3 instructions are 15 per cent faster, whilst standard office applications appear to be between five and eight per cent faster.
Gaming-wise, there are some big gains - with a GeForce 8800 Ultra card installed, Doom 3 and Far Cry see 10 per cent performance improvements at CPU-bound resolutions, and Half-Life 2 sees a staggering 30 per cent improvement, up from 132 FPS to 181
---------------------------------------------------------PCI Express 2---------------------------------

THE MURKY WORLD of Taiwanese graphics rumour-mongering currently puts Nvidia's first round of PCI-Express 2.0 cards on the market by October.
That's if OCWorkbench has gotten it right.
8x00 series cards should be rolling out on a PCI-E 2 interface as Q4 rolls in, just in time to plug into the new wave of Intel and Nvidia motherboards that will be supporting the new standard. Indeed, Intel's P35 chipset already has compatibility, RD790 will support it on the Red side, and Nvidia has already got internal boards working, we hear.
Version 2 of the spec increases speeds, providing double the signaling throughput (2.5GT/s up to 5GT/s).
The GeForce 9800 will almost certainly lead as a PCI-E 2 part, with a PCI-E standard variant for backwards compatibility. Don't expect the new revision to become the popular standard anytime soon, though - years after it was supposed to have died a death, new graphics boards are still appearing on AGP. Like the famous peasant in Monty Python's Holy Grail, it seems that AGP is not yet dead