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Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) [3] is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any given processor 's native bus.
One of the major improvements the PCI Local Bus had over other I/O architectures was its configuration mechanism. In addition to the normal memory-mapped and I/O port spaces, each device function on the bus has a configuration space, which is 256 bytes long, addressable by knowing the eight-bit PCI bus, five-bit device, and three-bit function numbers for the device (commonly referred to as the ...
The PCI-X standard was developed jointly by IBM, HP, and Compaq and submitted for approval in 1998. It was an effort to codify proprietary server extensions to the PCI local bus to address several shortcomings in PCI, and increase performance of high bandwidth devices, such as Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and Ultra3 SCSI cards, and allow processors to be interconnected in clusters.
Some other computer architectures use different modules with a different bus width. In a single-channel configuration, only one module at a time can transfer information to the CPU. In multi-channel configurations, multiple modules can transfer information to the CPU at the same time, in parallel.
PCI Express Mini Card (also known as Mini PCI Express, Mini PCIe, Mini PCI-E, mPCIe, and PEM), based on PCI Express, is a replacement for the Mini PCI form factor. It is developed by the PCI-SIG . The host device supports both PCI Express and USB 2.0 connectivity, and each card may use either standard.
An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS.
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Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), also known as reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM), is a computer hardware engineering term involving reliability engineering, high availability, and serviceability design. The phrase was originally used by IBM as a term to describe the robustness of their mainframe computers.