Introduce The Pci - Bus; Features - Gigabyte GA-586VX User Manual

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

q
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.
1-5
Introduction