The trends in the development of computer technology are obvious - this is unification, simplification for manufacturers (lower overhead costs) and the combination of many devices in a single package. It is not surprising that many modern novice users do not even know what a PCI bus is. Those who have found the times of the emergence of IBM-compatible computersbased on 286, 386 and other processors, no doubt, they remember the abundance of various buses and hardware interfaces used in computer systems of that time. This is the famous 8-bit ISA bus, then its revision to VLB (known as VESA), the PCI bus, a specialized Intel connector for soft modems, AGP, etc. Moreover, all of them, with rare exceptions, were needed. But at the present time on the motherboards there is a striking “poverty” - only the PCI Express bus, however, of different revisions and with a different number of signal lines. Alas, literally, the end user has to pay for such unification. After all, even if there is, for example, a high-quality sound card,which is a PCI-device, it simply has nowhere to connect (inconvenient adapters do not count) and you have to buy a version for another bus or, in general, switch to, frankly, a flawed, built-in solution. The situation is reminiscent of a story with the "forcible" transfer of all from AGP to PCI-E.
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1993 2.0.
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1997 PCI , Intel AGP , PCI.
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By the way, on some motherboards you can still find a PCI bus connector. However, we are not talking about native support from the chipset and processor - in this implementation method, a special bridge chip is used that redirects PCI requests to PCI Express.