Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is an advance which rendered Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) obsolete. PCI is a serial bus to which many different devices can be attached in order to give computers extended capabilities.
History
PCI was introduced to the market on July 1993 by Intel, which wanted to replace the previous EISA bus used in servers. For the typical PC, PCI did not become a plausible solution until nearly the end of 1994.
What Kinds of Devices are Connected to the PCI Bus?
Many different kinds of devices exist that can be connected to the PCI bus of a computer, including network interfaces (NICs), modems, FireWire adapters, sound cards and graphics cards.
Function
The function of PCI devices is to expand the capabilities of a computer and allow it to perform functions it could not perform before (such as connecting to the Internet through an internal modem), or could perform better (as a dedicated graphics card would do).
Benefits
PCI benefits from a higher rate of data transfer as compared to EISA and external devices connected through USB. Each device connected to the PCI bus has shared access to the primary resources of the computer through a parallel connection.
Disadvantages
One of the primary disadvantages of PCI is that you can only connect as many devices as there are slots in your motherboard's PCI bus. Also, PCI was superseded by PCI Express, which is faster and benefits from serial communication between the computer and devices.
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