I'm exploring my laptop, and stumbled upon device manager. I expanded system devices, and I saw this thing called "PCI bus", "PCI Host CPU Bridge", and "PCI Standard ISA bridge." What are those?
Extra question: I also saw somewhere system devices "SiS PCI Express x1, x16 Root Ports". Do they have anything in relation with the PCI bus (I know it's a stupid question...)?
Last Extra question, and I don't even know if it has something to do with my previous question: Can I get another graphics card for my laptop (I have an SiS Mirage 3 Integrated Graphics)?
In short PCI is a data communication bus. PCI for a long time was the standard before that you had a few others but PCI won out. There are "three" variants normal PCI, PCI-X as on server boards, that has more datalines so can be used with faster cards. Like scsi cards. And the modern PCI-E, it is not really a PCI bus it is more a replacement of the AGP but. The situation here is.
PCI and PCI-X share one main bus. Meaning that the bus has a limited bandwidth and that is shared wall the things connected to that PCI bus. What does this mean? Well if you put 12 HDD's into your PC and hook them up through the PCI bus you probably filled it up quite much. [nowadays we of course have SATA and that is allot nicer]
Right PCI-E is most use for graphic cards but each pci-e slot is it's own bus. Meaning it doesn't shares.. meaning more bandwidth where needed meaning less in the way of performance.
SO what does this all mean? Well not that much really in the end the PCI bus connects things like the audio chip, network chip stuff like that. Every laptop/pc has it and though nowadays we are pushing more for pci-e some thing are regulated to the PCI bus yes. There are always some controllers and little functions that don't require super performance and work fine sharing bandwidth with other things.
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What's a PCI bus?