A+ Hardware Service Technician: Computer Hardware, System Boards, and Storage Devices
8-bit Bus |
8-bit
The 8-bit expansion bus operates at a maximum of 4.77 MHz (approx. 5 MHz), has eight interrupts, four DMA Channels, and one large 62 slot card.
ISA Bus |
ISA Bus
The ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) bus is a 16-bit bus with a card slightly larger than the 8-bit. The 16-bit cards have an extra piece extending beyond the 8-bit card length. This bus has 16 interrupts and 8 DMA channels. ISA also runs at 8 MHz. ISA buses are backwards compatible with the 8-bit cards.
MCA Bus
The MCA (Micro Channel Architecture) bus was a proprietary bus designed by IBM. It is a 16-bit or 32-bit bus and it’s clock speed is 10 MHz. It also offered software configuration instead of dip switches and jumper settings.
EISA Bus |
EISA
EISA (Extended ISA) bus borrowed a lot of features from the MCA bus and expanded on them. It has a 32-bit bus and has more I/O addresses (Input/Output addresses or memory addresses). It also still uses the 8 MHz of the ISA bus to allow for backwards compatibility.
VLBus |
Vesa Local Bus
The VESA Local Bus (VLB) is a local bus type, meaning it is a bus which runs at the same speed as the processor. Typically, it is used for video to gain the advantage of the high speed of transfer of the processor. It is backwards compatible with the ISA, but has an extra slot to make it 32-bits.
PCI Bus |
PCI Bus
PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Bus is the newest and most advantageous type of all of the buses. It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit data paths to be compatible with 486 and Pentium class processors. PCI is also processor independent, allowing it to operate in Macintosh, PC, and RISC computers. PCI runs at 33 MHz and has a maximum throughput of 256 megabytes per second.
AGP Bus |
AGP Bus
AGP, or Accelerated Graphics Port, is a bus technology developed by Intel to support high speed video cards. The AGP interface uses the RAM in your computer to generate 3-D images and video very quickly.
PCMCIA Bus
PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card Association) is the last type of bus we will discuss. It is mainly used in laptops or other small computers and in some digital cameras. PCMCIA comes in three types, cleverly called Type I, Type II, and Type III.
Type I cards are 3.3 mm thick. Type II cards are
the most common type and are 5 mm thick. Type III cards are mainly used
for hard drives and are 10.5 mm thick.
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