GA-586ATV
1-4
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
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32 bits bus transfer mode.
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Bus Master or Slave access.
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Memory burst transfer to 132 MB/sec.
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33 MHz operation speed.
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10 device loading ability.
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CPU independent.
