Compared with PCI bus
and PCI-X bus, PCI Express lane is more powerful and faster. The PCI bus has a
fixed width of 32 bits, which allows a maximum speed of 33 MHz and 133 MB of
data to pass through the bus per second. The PCI-X has twice the bus width of
PCI. On the other hand, PCI-X is able to transfer data at different rates
according to different specifications. However, with the surprisingly rapid
development of science and technology, PCI and PCI-X can no longer satisfy
people’s demands for they need faster data transfer and more digital resources
to be dealt with at the same time.
After great efforts, PCI Express emerges as required. With a
single PCI Express lane, you are able to cope with 200 MB of traffic in each
direction per second. To people’s great surprise, a x16 PCIe connector is
capable of transferring 6.4 GB of data per second in each direction. As a
result, people can easily deal with large amounts of audio and storage
applications at the same time, which is extremely convenient and powerful.
People keep wondering:
how PCI Express connection speeds so fast? Actually, some simple advances make
these come true:
First of all, the system
gives priority to data, which means that it transfers the most significant data
first and prevent bottlenecks.
Second, it transfers
data immediately after receiving them.
Third, the physical
materials used to produce the connections have been improved.
Forth, handshaking and
error detection have been boosted up.
Fifth, the way to break
data into packets and put the packets together again has been improved.
Last but not least, with
the dedicated and point-to-point connection, multiple sources can work their
way through different buses.
With all these
improvements, PCI Express works faster and more efficiently.
