Expansion Cards

The letters “PCI” stand for Peripheral Component Interconnect, and is the term used to describe a bus that connects components directly to the system’s memory and to the system’s processor through the “frontside bus.” When discussing communications on a motherboard, the term “bus” has nothing to do with the big yellow thing that takes the kids to school. There may be several buses in a computer, and like the PCI bus, they are all responsible for managing the communication “traffic” from different devices to the processor.


The frontside bus is a high speed connection that manages the processor’s communication with items such as hard drives, memory, and PCI devices, while not burdening the processor with all of the management responsibilities.

First developed by Intel in the early 1990s, PCI was spawned from even earlier (and slower) bus architectures such as ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) and VL-Bus (VESA Local), which were common back in the 1980s and 1990s.