8 things you never knew about PCI EXPRESS

1 PCI EXPRESS IS OLD ENOUGH TO BUY AROUND OF DRINKS

We may think of PCI Express as a modern standard, but it was first introduced way back in 2002. To put into context just how long ago that was, the cross-industry group that developed it included Compaq and a company that still went by the full name of Hewlett-Packard, as well as Dell, IBM, Intel and Microsoft.

The tech was originally called 3GIO, short for “third-generation I/O”. That reflects its role as a successor to the venerable PCI bus and its short-lived follow-up PCI-X. But while the name emphasises its heritage, PCI Express works in a fundamentally different way to its predecessors. Those older interfaces used parallel data transfer, while PCI Express switched to a serial approach.

The reason is simple: while a serial connection might not transfer so many bits per cycle as a parallel one, it can often reliably run at much higher frequencies (hard disks were going through a similar transition at around this time, moving from the parallel IDE standard to Serial ATA, or SATA for