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Because of its shared bus topology, access to the older PCI bus is arbitrated (in the case of multiple masters), and limited to one master at a time, in a single direction. In contrast, PCI Express is based on point-to-point topology, with separate serial links connecting every device to the root complex (host).
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One of the key differences between the PCI Express bus and the older PCI is the bus topology PCI uses a shared parallel bus architecture, in which the PCI host and all devices share a common set of address, data, and control lines. Ĭonceptually, the PCI Express bus is a high-speed serial replacement of the older PCI/PCI-X bus. For instance, a x16 slot with only 4 PCIe lanes is quite common. Sometimes what may seem like a large slot may only have a few lanes. The PCIe slots on a motherboard are often labeled with the number of PCIe lanes they have.
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It is also used in the storage interfaces of SATA Express, U.2 (SFF-8639) and M.2.įormat specifications are maintained and developed by the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) - a group of more than 900 companies that also maintains the conventional PCI specifications. The analogy is a highway with traffic in both directions.) The interface is also used in a variety of other standards - most notably the laptop expansion card interface called ExpressCard. (A lane is a single send/receive line of data. The PCI Express electrical interface is measured by the number of simultaneous lanes. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism (Advanced Error Reporting, AER), and native hot-swap functionality. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, sound cards, hard disk drive host adapters, SSDs, Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware connections. PCI Express ( Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards.
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