For the last many years, traditionally on PCs, PCI was the standard bus for transferring data inside the PC such as between memory and Hard Disk. PCI was getting slower for the ever increasing processor, Memory and disk speeds. The new interface called PCI Express bases itself on a much faster serial communication system.
The higher speeds on PCI Express allow it to replace almost all existing internal buses, including AGP and PCI.
Components of a pc like processor, RAM, disk, and others need to talk to each other. The system that connects these components is called IO. Hard drives, peripherals, LAN cards, sound cards, USB, and firewire all pass data through the same I/O system as your first 486 PC; the PCI bus running at 33mhz and shifting 133MB/s of data.
Hard drives that are connected on the IDE interface can theoretically overload PCI. However PCI express will leave much speed for these devices removing the IO speed bottelnek.
What’s in it for you: In reality these are slots on the mother board of a PC, what you should look for in your PCs mother board is adoption of this technology.
Webs Best Links:
PCI Special Interest Group (www.pcisig.com/home)
RapidIO Trade Association (www.rapidio.org/home)
InfiniBand® Trade Organization (www.infinibandta.org/home)
HyperTransportTM Consortium (www.hypertransport.org/)
StarFabric Trade Association (www.starfabric.org/technology.htm)
PCI Express Specifications and White Papers (www.pcisig.com/specifications/pciexpress/)
Creating a Third Generation I/O Interconnect (PDF) (www.developer.intel.com/technology/pciexpress/downloads/3rdGenWhitePaper.pdf)
Intel Developer Network for PCI Express Architecture (www.intel.com/technology/pciexpress/devnet/)
Ars Technica introduction to PCI Express (www.arstechnica.com/paedia/p/pci-express/pcie-1.html)
Next : SATA for hard disk.