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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

How PCI-Express Breaks the Bus Barrier

APPLICATIONS, such as streaming video and photo editing, put heavy demands on PCs to move vast amounts of data ever quicker. Until recently, our PCs were bogged down as data was trundled among components by outdated buses—the peripheral components interconnect (PCI) and the accelerated graphics port (AGP). Even the fastest of them, AGP, which spewed out 2.134 gigabytes a second, couldn’t keep up with the demands of real-time—photorealistic animation that needs values for the colors of millions of pixels pushed through the circuits 60 times or more each second.

The solution is a bus architecture that uses both parallel and serial transfers. It’s called PCI-Express, or PCI-E.

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