PCI-X

From TPU Reference

Peripheral Component Interconnect eXtended

PCI-X (not to be confused with PCI-E) is an extension to the PCI standard. While a standard PCI bus has a limited bandwidth of 133MB/s (266MB/s for 66 MHz) PCI-X offers a maximum of 1066MB/s, eight times as much as standard PCI. This increased bandwidth is achieved by doubling the bus width and quadrupling the frequency. PCI-X can usually be found in high end workstation and server boards because most desktop systems have no need for the bandwidth. Most expansion cards made for the PCI-X bus are either disk controllers (SCSI, RAID) or high end network adapters (Multiport, Gigabit). Even though the maximum frequency of the bus is 133 MHz not all devices support this speed, 66 and 100 MHz speeds are more common.

PCI-X 2.0 allows additional bus speeds of 266 MHz and 533 MHz increasing maximum bandwidth to over 4GB/s.

See also

• PCI
• PCI-E
• ISA
• MCA
• VLB
• AGP