What is PCI (Peripheral component interconnected)?

The PCI is the short form of the peripheral component interconnected. It is a high performance bus which is used to processor, integrated chips (ICs), memory subsystem and expansion boards. The PCI bus is originally designed in 1992 by Intel for integrating chips on a board. It was 32 bit but now it also supported 64 bit transmission. It is useful for Pentium processor family because it is only bus which can transfer 64 bits of data in each clock cycle. The PCI gives separate memory and input or output port address spaces for the 86 processor family, 64 and 32 bits respectively. It provides a bus architecture which also support peripherals and devices such as network cards, hard disk drives etc. The PCI Bridge is used for connecting the catche or CPU or memory sub system with PCI bus. The PCI Bridge provides low latency path for the CPU to access any PCI device mapped into the memory space or I/O and the path for the PCI master to access main memory.

Peripheral component interconnected