There have been a lot of product delays in the tech industry lately - which is a good thing in my opinion because the core reason for most of them is improvements in the product quality. The latest technology to suffer a delay is the PCI Express 3.0 specifications, which were due in about month - and now would be finalized sometimes around during the second quarter of 2010.

The reason like I said before is that the PCI Special Interest Group intends to enhance the user experience quality of the product by making in backward compatible with current standards - task which may take a while to complete. The new standard which primarily bumps up the transfer speeds to about 8 billion transfers per second, needs to be able to support older hardware which uses PCI Express and PCI Express 2.0 architecture.

The delay would most probably mean that the next generation graphic cards, like the Radeon 5000 series and the GeForce 300 series wont be able to take advantage of the newer bandwidths. This might be a positive sign for those of us who wanted to build new systems but were waiting for technologies like USB 3.0, Sata 3.0 and PCIe 3.0 etc. While the first two would be in the market with the latest Intel P55 based motherboards, you would have to wait until about 2011 to get your hands on PCI Express 3.0 equipment.