Final answer:
The speed of a single-lane (x1) PCIe v. 3.x link is 985 MB/s, which reflects the net throughput after accounting for encoding overhead and provides rapid data transfer for connected devices.
Step-by-step explanation:
The speed of a single-lane (x1) PCIe v. 3.x link is 985 MB/s. PCI Express (PCIe) version 3.x achieved this speed per lane, using an encoding scheme with less overhead compared to previous versions. Each lane in a PCIe v. 3.x interface can provide a net throughput of approximately 8 Gb/s, which, when accounting for the 8b/10b encoding, equals to about 985 megabytes per second (MB/s). This high speed allows for rapid data transfer between the CPU and PCIe devices such as graphics cards, NVMe storage, and network cards.