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iSPAN Serial WAN Adapter Users Guide 189
EPCI/PMC Technology
Overview
PCI/PMC Technology
Intel® Corporation’s Architecture Lab, along with leading
computer vendors (the PCI SIG), designed the Peripheral
Component Interconnect (PCI) bus as the next generation I/O
expansion bus. Its predecessors were the ISA, EISA, and MCA
buses. The PCI bus is a high-performance bus found in systems
ranging from low-end PCs to high-end servers.
PCI was developed to overcome the bottlenecks associated
with traditional 16-bit expansion slots operating at 8 MHz, or,
essentially, 5 megabytes per second. The result was a local bus
system capable of transferring 32 bits of data at 33 MHz for a
maximum data transfer rate of 132 MBps. The PCI Local Bus
takes peripherals off the I/O bus and connects them together
with the CPU and the memory subsystem. This provides a
wider, faster pathway for data, which is especially important
for servers, graphic-intensive software, high-speed networks,
and other high-performance peripherals.
Features of the PCI Local Bus architecture include:
• Processor-independent bridge between the CPU and
high-speed peripherals that serves as traffic controller
between buses
• 32-bit memory addressing for CPU, Direct Memory
Access (DMA) devices, and bus masters
• 32-bit data transfers at 33 MHz for CPU, DMA, and bus
master devices
• 132 MBps maximum data transfer rate
• Data are written and read from peripherals in linear
bursts at every clock cycle