Bus Technology: PCI Express
A bus is an electrical wire in the computer’s circuitry—the highway that data travels on between the computer’s various components. Many industry insiders think that in the near future, we’ll see the PCI Express bus technology totally replace both traditional Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) buses and Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) buses, common on machines today. We’re already seeing the emergence of the PCI Express bus in several high-end systems.
Use the Internet to research the PCI Express bus. Write a few paragraphs that answer the following questions.
- Is the PCI Express bus compatible with Windows 95, Windows 2000, and Windows XP operating systems?
- Can PCI Express and AGP reside in the same machine?
- How much more bandwidth does the PCI Express bus have when compared to AGP?
- Can you find a prebuilt system on the Internet with a PCI Express bus? If so, who makes the system? Compare the cost of this system to a comparable machine without a PCI Express bus. Does the PCI Express bus seem to affect the price?
Suggested Web Sites:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/pcie.ars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-Express
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/bus/pci/default.mspx
Suggested Keywords:
PCI Express, What Is PCI Express, PCI Express FAQ
