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BUS



Buses have grown and evolved over the years in an effort to match the performance of all the other computer components. Even so, the evolution of the bus has been surprisingly slow compared to other technologies. Most computers sold today still have an Industry Standard Architecture ISA bus that will accept computer cards developed for the original IBM PC in the early 1980s.
There have been a combination of primary reasons for this bus prolonged existence:
  • There is a need for long-term compatibility with a large number of hardware manufacturers.
  • Before the rise of multimedia, few hardware peripherals fully utilized the speed of the bus.
A typical computer has two key buses. The first one, known as the system bus or local bus, connects the microprocessor (central processing unit) and the system memory. Other buses, such as the ISA and PCI buses, connect to the system bus through a bridge, which is a part of the computer's chipset, integrating the data from the other buses to the system bus.
As the speed of central processing units (CPUs) and RAM increased, it became more important to isolate the path between processor and memory. A replacement for the standard system bus, called Dual Independent Bus (DIB), was created. DIB replaced the single system bus with a frontside bus and a backside bus. The backside bus had one purpose: to provide a direct, fast channel between the CPU and the Level 2 cache. The frontside bus connected the system memory, via the memory controller, to the CPU, and the other buses to the CPU and system memory.


last edited (November 12, 2002) by chetan, Number of views: 6712, Current Rev: 2 (Diff)

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