[kabdib]

PCIe 3.0 actually uses a 128b to 130b encoding (I guess clock recovery got a lot better, but they also use different whitening patterns). Data is distributed across the lanes, bit by bit, and reassembled by the receiver. There's a bunch of training and link configuration stuff going on.

Once you have multiple channels of these (because 16 lanes wasn't enough bandwidth) you have the possibility that one channel gets transaction errors while the other doesn't, resulting in skewed arrival or even just missing data. So you need a software layer to deal with this, it's no longer "plug something in and you get bus level reliability," instead it's more like networking, where you have to do some reassembly as data arrives, and probably embed sequence number or other information in the data so you can identify bad and missing transfers. (Or you could say, "screw it, it's reliable enough" and wait for customers to complain; if they never do, you either made the right engineering decision or your business isn't big enough yet :-) ).