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GA-686NX
1.5. INTRODUCE THE PCI - BUS
Connecting devices to a CPU local bus can dramatically increase the speed of I/O-
bound peripherals with only a slight increase in cost over traditional systems.
This price / performance point has created a vast market potential for local bus
products.
The main barrier to this market has been the lack of an accepted standard for local bus
peripherals.
Many mainboard and chipset manufactures developed their own local bus
implementations, but they are incompatible with each other.
The VL (Video Electronics Standards Association) local bus and PCI (Peripheral
Component Interconnect) bus specification was created to end this confusion.
The PCI - bus standard, under development since Jun. 1992, which is designed to
bring workstation-level performance to standard PC platform. The PCI - bus removes
many of the bottlenecks that have hampered PC for several years.
On the PCI - bus, peripherals operate at the native speed of the computer system, thus
enabling data transfer between peripherals and the system at maximum speed.
This performance is critical for bandwidth-constrained devices such as video,
multimedia, mass storage, and networking adapters.
PCI - bus standard provides end-users with a low-cost, extendible and portable local
bus design, which will allow system and peripherals from different manufactures to
work together.
1.6. FEATURES
32 bits bus transfer mode.
q
Bus Master or Slave access.
q
Memory burst transfer to 132 MB/sec.
q
33 MHz operation speed.
q
10 device loading ability.
q
CPU independent.
q
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