Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)
The PCI bus specification was released in June 1992 as version 1.0 & since then have several upgrades. PCI bypasses the standard I/O bus, it uses the system bus to increase the bus clock speed and take full advantage of the CPU's data path.
The best features of the PCI slots are as bellow.
- PCI cards do not have any jumpers, switches and are configured through the software.
- PCI designs use special bus and chip set for advance bus mastering techniques. This allows to supports more then three PCI slots.
- The PCI bus has its own set of Interrupts number for each slot, if a PC have more then four PCI slots, some of them will be sharing interrupts and IRQ,s
