ARCHIVED: What is PCI?

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PCI, or Peripheral Component Interconnect, is a broad industry-standard bus architecture originally developed by Intel; Intel allowed an industry-wide committee to finalize its specifications. This standard was an improvement to previous expansion bus options. It allows for wider interoperability between Macintosh and Windows-based systems. It also allows Macintosh and PC computers to communicate with expansion cards at speeds over three times faster than other options. Apple currently uses PCI on all of its expandable desktop Macintoshes, which includes all new Power Macintosh computers. For PCs, PCI is by far the most common expansion slot architecture. It was first implemented on the 486 class of computers, and for current PCs is considered the only internal expansion slot architecture for everything but video, which uses AGP.

There is a newer interface called PCI Express using PCI programming concepts, with a serial physical-layer protocol and different connectors. PCI Express is expected to replace the PCI (and PCI-derived AGP) buses at some point in the future.

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Last modified on 2018-01-18 09:20:44.