| PCI Express 技術 |
| Most PC enthusiasts can not remember a time when they did not use PCI-compatible hardware when upgrading their video or sound to make their PC the worst gaming machine on the block. In may come as a surprise to some that the PCI interface has been with us for over 10 years now-in terms of our own time frames this could be compared to say, the discovery of electricity or the invention of the wheel. All joking aside, the original PCI interface was first used way back in 1991 when the internet was merely a rumor, while version 2.0 that we use now has been the de facto standard in PC hardware since 1993, when the Internet was being referred to as the "information superhighway". While this term seems quaint at best now, it illustrates how far the information revolution has come without a comparable change in technology. While there were other competitors to PCI, ironically one of the main reasons PCI became so popular with hardware manufacturers was because its bus transfer speed could be kept to a manageable 33 MHZ and separate from the speed of the processor. Other I/O standards, such as the VL bus, were run synchronously with the processor, so as processor speeds increased, so did the speed of the bus. This meant that hardware such as VGAs and soundcards had to be engineered to be able to keep up with the CPU. With the ongoing dramatic increase in processor speeds, this would have been an expensive proposition, as processor speeds have increased by 10 times in just a few years. Designing all peripherals to be 10 times as fast would have been complicated, expensive or perhaps even impossible. The chipset's evolution into a northbridge (memory hub) and southbridge (I/0 hub) has occurred because of the need to keep the stable I/O hub separate from the ever-increasing speed of the memory hub. While speeds, performance, and price of processor and memory have increased, the overall price of the PC has been kept down because of the stability inherent to the PCI bus architecture. |
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