Peripheral Component Interconnect

• PCI is a standard for I/O buses and device interfacing

• Introduced in 1991 by Intel and many others

• Used on architectures IA-32, Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC64, ...

• 32-bit internal bus (64 bit in PCI 2.1)

• Clock speed: 25/33MHz

• (66MHz in PCI 2.1, 133MHz in PCI-X)

• It allows transfers in burst mode

• It allows bus mastering

• PCI devices are plug and play

• PCI devices may be hot-pluggable (i.e.: CardBus)