Compared with PCI bus and PCI-X bus, PCI Express lane is more powerful and faster. The PCI bus has a fixed width of 32 bits, which allows a maximum speed of 33 MHz and 133 MB of data to pass through the bus per second. The PCI-X has twice the bus width of PCI. On the other hand, PCI-X is able to transfer data at different rates according to different specifications. However, with the surprisingly rapid development of science and technology, PCI and PCI-X can no longer satisfy people’s demands for they need faster data transfer and more digital resources to be dealt with at the same time.
After great efforts, PCI Express emerges as required. With a single PCI Express lane, you are able to cope with 200 MB of traffic in each direction per second. To people’s great surprise, a x16 PCIe connector is capable of transferring 6.4 GB of data per second in each direction. As a result, people can easily deal with large amounts of audio and storage applications at the same time, which is extremely convenient and powerful.
People keep wondering: how PCI Express connection speeds so fast? Actually, some simple advances make these come true:
First of all, the system gives priority to data, which means that it transfers the most significant data first and prevent bottlenecks.
Second, it transfers data immediately after receiving them.
Third, the physical materials used to produce the connections have been improved.
Forth, handshaking and error detection have been boosted up.
Fifth, the way to break data into packets and put the packets together again has been improved.
Last but not least, with the dedicated and point-to-point connection, multiple sources can work their way through different buses.
With all these improvements, PCI Express works faster and more efficiently.
