The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), PCI eXtended (PCI-X), and PCI Expre

Question

• The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), PCI eXtended (PCI-X), and PCI Express (PCIe) are families of bus standards that define the computer address, data, and control bus functions. Compare and contrast these standards in terms of bus architecture, data transfer rates, clock rates, and supported bus sizes. Discuss what bus standards you would typically use in an enterprise server versus a desktop computing environment.
• Multicore and multiprocessors are able to run applications in parallel thus reducing execution time and increasing system performance. Describe challenges and limitations of designing and running parallelized programs using multicore and multiprocessors systems in terms of concurrency issues, memory utilization, data caching, and programming languages for building parallel applications. Select the parallel programming language that you would prefer and explain your selection.

Explanation / Answer

PCI-X (Peripheral Component Interconnect Extended) is a computer bus technology (the "data pipes" between parts of a computer) that increases the speed that data can move within a computer from 66 MHz to 133 MHz. The technology was developed jointly by IBM, HP, and Compaq. PCI-X doubles the speed and amount of data exchanged between the computer processor and peripherals. With the current PCI design, one 64-bit bus runs at 66 MHz and additional buses move 32 bits at 66 MHz or 64 bits at 33 MHz. The maximum amount of data exchanged between the processor and peripherals using the current PCI design is 532 MB per second. With PCI-X, one 64-bit bus runs at 133 MHz with the rest running at 66 MHz, allowing for a data exchange of 1.06 GB per second. PCI-X is backwards-compatible, meaning that you can, for example, install a PCI-X card in a standard PCI slot but expect a decrease in speed to 33 MHz. You can also use both PCI and PCI-X cards on the same bus but the bus speed will run at the speed of the slowest card. PCI-X is more fault tolerant than PCI. For example, PCI-X is able to reinitialize a faulty card or take it offline before computer failure occurs.

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