Introduction to PCI

PCI stands for the Peripheral Component interconnect.  It is the computer bus on the motherboard and it is used to attach the peripheral devices to the computer’s motherboard. A bus is a channel or path for the transmitting the signals between two components on the computer.  

The high speed bus is recommend to get the fast and optimized performance from the compute system. PCI is an interconnection system between the processor and the attached devices.  It sends the 32 bits at a time in a 124 pin connection 64 bit in the 188-pin connection. PCI is a 64-bits bus that can run at the clock speed of 33 to 66 MHz. 

  It was developed by the Intel Corporation and it is not confined to a particular type of the motherboard.  PCI devices are the plug and play devices means that the system detects them automatically. PCI slots are available in the Intel and the AMD motherboards and different computer cards like VGA card, sound card and LAN card can be inserted in these slots. A new bus standard PCI Express is a new point-to-point connection. 

It does not share the bandwidth and communicate directly with the system memory and the connected devices.  PCI Express has different types of the buses like PCI Express 1X to PCI Express 32X and the bandwidth ranges from the 32 to 8000Mbps. PCI Express slots come in several types to hold the devices and they provide the greater bandwidth.

 The increased bandwidth results in the increased and optimized system performance. PCI Express is a serial Bus technology that allows the data to be transmitted in the two directions.  PCI Express can be used as the I/O structure for the desktop computes, servers, workstations and the mobiles.