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PCI
"PCI" is an acronym for "peripheral component interconnect" and refers to a bus system developed by Intel as a high performance alternative to the VESA local bus (VLB).
The PCI bus came into widespread usage quickly with the introduction of the Pentium processors, since the VLB was no longer able to fully utilise the Pentium processors' performance capacity.
The PCI bus is independent of the processor being used and thus can be used with other systems as well (e.g., Apple Macintosh).
In its current Version 2.0, the PCI standard has a maximum transmission rate of 132 Mbytes/s and a data width of 32 Bit, with a clock speed between 25 and 33 MHz.
Together with the corresponding BIOS, PCI allows automatic
configuration of plug-in cards.
Like the VLB before, the PCI bus mainly comes into play for extension cards with high data throughput rates, such as, for example, graphic card or hard disk controllers.
PCI specification 2.1 is currently in development and will double the data width to 64 Bit
with transmission rates of up to 264 Mbytes/s.
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