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Just over three months after hitting the release candidate stage, the PCI Express 2.0 specification has been finalized at last. As EE Times reports, the PCI Special Interest Group announced the spec's completion earlier today. PCIe 2.0 doubles the per-lane signal speed of the current standard from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps, allowing a single PCIe x16 slot to pump up to 16GB/s of bandwidth in full-duplex mode (8GB/s in each direction.) PCIe 2.0 is also compatible with previous versions of the standard, just like how Serial ATA 3Gbps is backwards-compatible with the 1.5Gbps standard. According to EE Times, we should start seeing the first chipsets with PCIe 2.0 support from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia this fall. Intel's first PCIe 2.0 desktop chipset will be part of the Bearlake series, while AMD's will supposedly be dubbed RD790.