PCI Express Battles PCI-X

Actually, this is not something that I have given a lot of thought about until recently. As it turns out, there are some differences that you may want to educate yourself about…

The PCI Express (PCIe) interface has been around for about a year and a half now, but so far it has only been able to establish itself as a graphics interface. Desktop motherboards with PCI Express support additional expansion slots, but today these are being used just as infrequently as their higher bandwidth versions on server and workstation motherboards.

While in theory PCI Express x16 can offer clearly more performance than PCI-X 533 - 8 GB/s compared to 4.26 GB/s - it is important to underscore that PCIe was not developed to replace PCI-X, but rather some of the older add-in card interfaces. It was aimed at replacing AGP graphics for marketing reasons, and enabling the dual graphics pathway. The aged parallel 32 Bit PCI bus also required replacement; , it can only be called lame today, as its total bandwidth is relatively low and shared among all PCI devices. Modern technology applications - such as Gigabit Ethernet, high definition content-related hardware and storage adapters - require higher bandwidth that is constantly available. [Read the rest]