Confused about PCIe? Learn all about PCIe in this article!

With the continuous development of computer technology, various high-speed communication interfaces have emerged to meet the needs of high-performance computing and data transmission. Among them, the PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) interface has become one of the most important external bus standards in modern computers due to its excellent performance and scalability.

To understand what PCIe is, we first need to talk about what a bus is. To put it simply, we can compare a computer motherboard to a city, and the public roads in the city are the buses.

When a store in a city wants to get goods from a warehouse, what should it do? It must go to the warehouse through a road to get the goods. The bus is also a concept. When the functional components on our computer motherboard need to communicate with each other, they must do so through the bus. This is the role of the bus.

In the 1980s, IBM and Intel jointly developed a bus standard: PC/AT, which we mentioned earlier as the ISA bus. Due to its good compatibility, ISA was widely used in the industry for a long time.

However, as the original bus, it also has many weaknesses, such as low transmission rate, inability to plug and play and other problems that cannot be solved. Therefore, the elimination of the ISA bus has become inevitable.

In 1991, Intel introduced a new, more advanced bus standard: the PCI bus. Compared to its predecessor, ISA, PCI offered significant speed improvements, automatic resource configuration, and plug-and-play support, quickly dominating the market amidst a fierce competition among major manufacturers.

However, the PCI bus also has its own drawbacks. It and ISA both use a parallel bus design, and bandwidth cannot be further increased due to signal integrity issues. At this time, a new interface was needed to replace PCI. Finally, with the hard work of technicians, the PCI-E we are familiar with was born.

PCI-E (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard. This technological upgrade completely changes the previous PCI shared bus architecture to a point-to-point connection with greater bandwidth and faster speeds.

The most common PCIe interface is the long slot on our motherboards. It comes in four sizes: x1, x4, x8, and x16. It offers extremely high transfer speeds and bandwidth. Within the same PCIe version, x16 offers the fastest speed and the greatest bandwidth, followed by x8, x4, and x1.

PCIe also boasts strong compatibility, making it easy to expand your computer with various devices. In addition to common graphics cards, PCIe interfaces can also conveniently accommodate network cards, sound cards, and other devices.

In addition to the common long-slot PCIe interface, many other interfaces also use PCIe channels to transmit data. The most common is the M.2 interface on our motherboard*. Because the SATA interface has limited transmission speeds and cannot meet demand, the M.2 interface using the PCIe channel was created to achieve faster transmission speeds. So, what is a PCIe channel?